Enhancing the Grid with Multi-agent and Semantic Capabilities

Addressing the requirements of academic end users, the Grid paradigm and its underlying technologies was in past developed and evolved neglecting the needs of potential business end users. Nowadays the trend changed towards the use of Grid technologies within electronic business (e-Business) which at the same time requires adapting existing technologies to allow for more flexible, intelligent and reliable support for business stakeholders. The BREIN project was the first one integrating two so far parallel evolving domains into the Grid, namely multi-agent and semantics. By this, the Grid was enhanced to provide the requested capabilities from business end users. This chapter will show the rationale behind the performed developments and the way how BREIN addresses its four main objectives of enabling and/or enhancing: (i) Autonomy and Automation, (ii) Self-Optimization, (iii) Context-Aware Security, (iv) Reduced Complexity of Use with a dedicated focus on the major pillars of the framework, Virtual Organizations (VOs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). With that, a generic solution is presented, which can be applied to a variety of distinct application areas.

Grid Scheduling

This chapter will present the scheduling mechanism in distributed systems with direct application in grids. The resource heterogeneity, the size and number of tasks, the variety of policies, and the high number of constraints are some of the main characteristics that contribute to this complexity. The necessity of scheduling in grid is sustained by the increasing of number of users and applications. The design of scheduling algorithms for a heterogeneous computing system interconnected with an arbitrary communication network is one of the actual concerns in distributed system research. The main concerns presented in the chapter refers to general presentation of scheduling for grid systems, specific requirements of scheduling in grids, critical analysis of existing methods and algorithms for grid schedulers, scheduling policies, fault tolerance in scheduling process in grid environments, scheduling models and algorithms and optimization techniques for grid scheduling.

E-Infrastructures for International Cooperation

E-infrastructures are becoming in Europe and in other regions of the world standard platforms to support e-Science and foster virtual research communities. This chapter provides the reader with a comprehensive view of the developments of e-Infrastructures in China, India, Asia-Pacific, Mediterranean, Middle-East, Sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Europe and Latin America and with an outlook on the very important issue of their long term sustainability.

Grid, SOA and Cloud Computing

In this chapter we are going to introduce the key concepts of SOA, grid, and cloud computing and the relation between them. This chapter illustrates the paradigm shift in technological services due to the incorporation of these models and how we can combine them to develop a highly scalable application system such as petascale computing. Also there will be coverage for some concepts of Web 2.0 and why it needs grid computing and the on-demand enterprise model. Finally, we will discuss some standardization efforts on these models as a further step in developing interoperable grid systems.

Application of Grid Computing for Meteorological Assessment of Wind and Solar Resources in Sub-Saharan African Countries

Developing countries especially those in sub-Saharan Africa face a major challenge in meteorological prediction and numerical assessment of wind and solar resources. This is mainly attributed to lack of expertise and requisite equipment. A proven approach is the utilization of remote grid computing essentially undertaking grid computing remotely by accessing the grid computers in host countries with more advanced Information Technology infrastructure. This chapter details the utilisation of a Numerical Mesoscale model with a horizontal resolution of 1 km in assessing wind resources in Kenya. The presented country in Sub-Saharan Africa uses a large-scale High-Performance Computer (HPC) that combines heterogeneous computing resources in Germany. The same model can be used for assessment of solar resources.

Security Standards and Issues for Grid Computing

Security in grid environments that are built using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies is a great challenge. On one hand, the great diversity in security technologies, mechanisms and protocols that each organization follows and on the other hand, the different goals and policies that these organizations adopt, comprise a complex security environment. Authenticating and authorizing users and services, identity management in a multi-organizational scenario and secure communication define the main context of the problem. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the security protocols and technologies that can be applied on a Web Service (WS) based grid environment.

Grid Access Control Models and Architectures

In recent years, grid computing has become the focal point of science and enterprise computer environments. Access control in grid computing systems is an active research area given the challenges and complex applications. First, a number of concepts and terminology related to the area of grid access control are provided. Next, an analysis of the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Usage Control ABC (UCONABC) models is given, due to their adaption from the grid computing systems. Additionally, a presentation of well known grid access control architectures illustrates how the theoretical access control models are implemented into mechanisms. In a comparative review of the examined access control models and mechanisms, their pros and cons are exposed. Apart from the mapping of the access control area in grid computer systems, the given comparison renders valuable information for further advancement of current approaches.

Grid Data Handling

To accommodate the needs of large-scale distributed systems, scalable data storage and management strategies are required, allowing applications to efficiently cope with continuously growing, highly distributed data. This chapter addresses the key issues of data handling in grid environments focusing on storing, accessing, managing and processing data. We start by providing the background for the data storage issue in grid environments. We outline the main challenges addressed by distributed storage systems: high availability which translates into high resilience and consistency, corruption handling regarding arbitrary faults, fault tolerance, asynchrony, fairness, access control and transparency. The core part of the chapter presents how existing solutions cope with these high requirements. The most important research results are organized along several themes: grid data storage, distributed file systems, data transfer and retrieval and data management. Important characteristics such as performance, efficient use of resources, fault tolerance, security, and others are strongly determined by the adopted system architectures and the technologies behind them. For each topic, we shortly present previous work, describe the most recent achievements, highlight their advantages and limitations, and indicate future research trends in distributed data storage and management.

Adaptive Grid Services

The chapter aims to explore the implementation of grid services and defines a theoretical approach to a development framework which would enable the creation of agile services. At present, services are written with specific goals in mind which may support the majority of users of the service. However if the requirements of the users change, or there exist users who require a slightly alternative form of the service, then either multiple services must be orchestrated to provide the required functionality to the users, or a new service must be implemented to address any gaps in functionality. An alternative solution is presented in the chapter which adopts aspect-oriented programming as a core component in the framework. By utilizing this paradigm, it becomes possible to develop services that are agile; capable of combining the capabilities required to support requests being submitted to the grid node dependent upon individual needs. To facilitate this mechanism, a pool of service components must be created from which the weaving component of the framework can select, via semantic discovery, the most appropriate.

Information Security in Data and Storage Grids through GS3

In this work we face the problem of data security in grid, by proposing a lightweight cryptography algorithm combining the strong and highly secure asymmetric cryptography technique (RSA) with the symmetric cryptography (Advanced Encryption Standard, AES). The proposed algorithm, we named Grid Secure Storage System (GS3), has been implemented on top of the Grid File Access Library (GFAL) of the gLite middleware, in order to provide a file system service with cryptography capability and POSIX interface. The choice of implementing GS3 as a file system allows to protect also the file system structure, and moreover to overcome the well-known problem of file rewriting in gLite/GFAL environments. This chapter describes and details both the GS3 algorithm and its implementation, also evaluating the performance of such implementation and discussing the obtained results.