------------------------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: The Grid: International Efforts in Global Computing AUTHORS: Mark Baker, Rajkumar Buyya and Domenico Laforenza ABSTRACT: The last decade have seen a considerable increase in commodity computer and network performance, mainly as a result of faster hardware and more sophisticated software. Nevertheless, there are still problems, in the fields of Science, Engineering and Business, which cannot be dealt with using currently available supercomputers. In fact, due to their size and complexity, these problems are numerically and/or data intensive and they require a number of heterogeneous resources, which is considerably higher than currently available in a single machine. In several important research centers tests are conducted on the cooperative use of geographically distributed resources conceived as a single powerful computer. Several words have been coined to describe this new computational approach, such as Metacomputing, Heterogeneous Computing, Networked Virtual Supercomputing, Heterogeneous Supercomputing, Seamless Computing, Federated Clusters and, more recently, Computational Grids. The concept of Grid Computing started as a project to link supercomputing sites, but now it has grown far beyond its original intent. In fact, there are many several applications that can benefit from the grid infrastructure, including collaborative engineering, data exploration, high throughput computing, and of course distributed supercomputing. Moreover, mainly due to the rapid and impressive spreading of Internet, there is a rising interest towards the so-called Web-based Parallel Computing. In fact, some researchers are becoming to exploit the World Wide Web as an infrastructure for running coarse-grained parallel applications on numerous machines. In this view, the WWW has the capabilities to become a suitable and potentially infinite scalable metacomputer for parallel and collaborative work and a key technology to create a pervasive and ubiquitous grid infrastructure. This paper aims to present the state-of-the-art of grid computing and attempts to survey the major international adventures in this area. Keywords: Wide-area Computing, Computational Grids, Global Computing, Resource Management and Scheduling. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Authors Contact Details: Mark Baker School of Computer Science University of Portsmouth, c/o Milton Campus, Southsea, Hants, UK Tel: +44 1705 844285 Fax: +44 1705 844006 E-mail: Mark.Baker@port.ac.uk Rajkumar Buyya School of Computer Science and Software Engineering Monash University, C5.10, Caulfield Campus Melbourne, VIC 3145, Australia Phone: +61-3-9903 1969 (office); +61-3-9571 3629 (home) Fax: +61-3-9903 2863; eFax: +1-801-720-9272 Email: rajkumar@buyya.org | rajkumar@csse.monash.edu.au | rajkumar@ieee.org DOMENICO LAFORENZA Responsible of the CNUCE Advanced Computing Department CNUCE-Institute of the Italian National Research Council Room #35 New CNR's Campus ("Area della Ricerca" ) Via Alfieri, 1 56010 Ghezzano, Pisa, Italy Email: Domenico.Laforenza@cnuce.cnr.it Phone: +39 050 315-2992 (Direct) Fax: +39 050 3138092 (G4) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------