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.
CSLab also participates in the
GREDIA European Project. Grid technology has achieved significant advances in the past few years with a plethora of prestigious organisations contributing to middleware that opens the horizons for new exploitation opportunities. However, this potential exploitation has not yet been seen to materialise in emerging applications. The use of Grid technology is still confined mainly within scientific applications, developed by scientific organisations, being experts in Grid principles. The majority of IT application developing organisations is still afraid to delve into the use of Grid technologies, as these still sound new and remote to them.
GREDIA (FP6 34363 - Grid enabled access to rich media content) will address this problem with the provision of a Grid application development platform.
GridTorrent is an implementation of the popular BitTorrent protocol designed to interface and integrate with well-defined and deployed Data Grid components and protocols (e.g. GridFTP, RLS). Just like BitTorrent, GridTorrent is based on peer-to-peer techniques, that allow clients to download files from multiple sources while uploading them to other users at the same time, rather than obtaining them from a central server.