Institute leader: Paraskevi Fragopoulou (fragopou ics.forth.gr), FORTH
| 
| The goal of the institute on architectural issues is to deliver paradigms, methods, and prototypes for creation of future GRID architectures. Particular focus is given to three aspects: scalability, adaptability, and dependability of future GRIDs. The research within this institute will be conducted concurrently on these three aspects (and possibly others). However, a periodical integration of the approaches and interoperability testing is planned. There are many challenges to realize the vision of next generation GRIDs in respect to architectures. Compared to classical distributed systems, the scale (to millions of nodes), dynamicity and node variety (sensors, mobile devices, supercomputers) of next generation GRIDs pose major challenges in system design. The systems must not only scale well, but also need to be robust in the face of both node volatility and malicious nodes/users. At the same time, the systems must stay manageable and this will require a large degree of self-organization. To face these challenges and evaluate the applicability of emerging methods, we arranged the research issues in the system architecture institute into three key fields: | Scalability Currently, GRID systems are based on the traditional client-server paradigm, which may not be able to scale to millions of nodes. Several researchers have pointed out this limit in scalability. Based on these observations, the goal of this research is to study the limitations on scalability of existing GRID architectures and to design, prototype, and test scalable approaches for key system components of a GRID infrastructure such as the resource discovery engine, scheduler, and security mechanisms. Adaptability The existing architecture of the GRID systems features virtually no mechanisms for automatic adaptation of the systems or its parts to new internally or externally imposed conditions. To develop an “adaptive GRID” it is necessary to provide mechanisms for automated adaptation and reconfiguration of the GRIDs on all hierarchy levels. Such mechanisms include monitoring of the state of the GRID, its analysis together with decision taking, “intelligent” decision execution and finally delegation of control to human operators. Dependability One of the main challenges for GRID computing is the ability to tolerate failures and recover from them (ideally in a transparent way). Current GRID middleware still lacks mature fault tolerant features and next-generation GRIDs need to solve this problem providing a more dependable infrastructure to execute large-scale computations by using remote clusters and HPC systems. | Roadmap version 3 on Architectural Issues: Scalability, Dependability, Adaptability
Publications related to the Institute on Architectural Issues
|
|
Last Updated ( Thursday, 25 October 2007 )
|
Home
