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I wrote an article a couple of years back focusing on Large Grids (Developer.com). I made the following claim in that article:
“A large Grid is any extension to the original and first application deployment on that Grid”
I wanted to revisit this claim and focus on large Grids and the challenge that they bring to an organization. Keeping in mind that there are many grid implementations out there with over a couple of thousand Cores; why do I feel that the large grid issue has not yet been resolved?
There are two classes of challenges faced by an organization tackling this issue:
- Political
- Technological
Each class of problem is composed of a number of sub-problems. Generally speaking, we are looking to answer two families of questions: 1) How can the political mine-field be navigated to ensure the buy-in and support of the users of the Grid, and 2) What are the technological advances that can used to aid this process?
We will get to each of these problems in due time, but I wanted to briefly touch on the overall problem statement. What we are aiming for is what is known as a virtual Organization (VO) which is essentially a set of users or applications that have some commonality among them. Each of these applications is managed independently, but at the high-level they appear as one. The idea would be to break our [very] large Grid installation into smaller more compartmental sized installations – managed locally by the administrator. There are a set of policies that govern the interaction of these organizations allowing for cross-departmental access, but a user can access a VO from by complying with its policies and interface.
Conceptually speaking, a Virtual Organization is what we need to strive towards. The size of a VO is somewhat irrelevant, and in practice each organization must make its own decision on what a VO should be and how it is organized and that is where we run into the two classes of the problems we talked about.
Needless to say that we have our work cut out for us. Most organizations have pockets of small installations; for some Grid is used as the means of processing overnight tasks. In either case, we need to focus on how we can incorporate, adapt and provide a single-view infrastructure to our users.
Keep on reading…
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