Grid Computing
Grids enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources (such as supercomputers, compute clusters, storage systems, data sources, instruments, people) and present them as a single, unified resource for solving large-scale compute and data intensive applications. This idea is analogous to the electric power network (grid) where power generators are distributed, but the users are able to access electric power without bothering about the source of energy and its location.
Grid Computing is a very broad research area, as many different technologies are combined together to create Grid environments that target different needs.
Our research efforts focus on using
P2P technologies to establish solutions for
storing,
indexing and
transferring data.
CSLab participates in the
Grid4All European Project.
Grid4All embraces the vision of a democratic Grid as a ubiquitous utility whereby domestic users, small organisations and enterprises may draw on resources on the Internet without having to individually invest and manage computing and IT resources.
Grid users are organised in Virtual Organisations (VOs). VOs allocate resources from their users or external providers and make them available to users' applications.
Our part in
Grid4All, is to research and develop
DFS, a storage substrate that will support
Grid4All VOs with file and storage aggregation and VO-aware access to them.