Grid Systems Sample Clauses

Grid Systems. ‌ In general, a Grid is described by Xxxxxxx et al. [70, p.135] as “a very large scale, generalized distributed NC system that can scale to Internet-size environments with machines distributed across multiple organisations and administrative domains”, where a network computing (NC) system is a distributed system that consists of a number of heterogeneous computational nodes, combined into a network, which consent to share their own resources with each other. There are also other approaches, aside from Grid computing, which allow clients to use large amounts of computational and other types of resources. Some researchers [71, 72] propose to use social networks in order to pool the large amounts of resources based on the trust relationships established among users. The users of social networks are expected to be encouraged through payments or barter to share their personal com- puters. This approach potentially can pool a huge amounts of resources, but it also has stability and security concerns. Social networks’ users are not necessarily aware of a proper computer maintenance such as virus protection, hardware and software main- tenance, etc. Hence, this approach is not suitable at its current stage for interruption sensitive applications. A Cloud environment [7] can also provide a potentially unlimited amounts of resources, but it has a greater degree of resource virtualisation with a more friendly user interface than a Grid. The concepts of Grid and Cloud computing are not mutually exclusive and generally aim to provide clients with the larger resource amounts than any single supercomputer or cluster. Cloud resources may also fail and they have their approxi- mate peaks and lows of resource availability [7], while the durations of allocation are usually even shorter than in a Grid [16]. In our work, we focus on Grid computing rather than Cloud computing, but Grid technology can be also used as a basis for a Cloud [73].