The Grid refers to an infrastructure that enables the integrated, collaborative use of high-end computers, networks, databases, and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing and often require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries, and are thus not easily handled by today’s Internet and Web infrastructures.
Two papers that provide overviews of Grid computing are Anatomy of the Grid, which defines Grid computing, proposes a Grid architecture, and discusses relationships between Grid technologies and other contemporary technologies; and Physiology of the Grid, which describes how Grid mechanisms can implement a service-oriented architecture, explains how Grid functionality can be incorporated into a Web Services framework, and illustrates how this architecture can be applied within commercial computing as a basis for distributed system integration.
An older but more extensive reference is the book The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, I. Foster and C. Kesselman (Eds), Morgan Kaufmann, 1999. Its 22 chapters by noted experts cover applications, tools, and infrastructure.
MDSplus is a set of software tools for data acquisition and storage and a methodology for management of complex scientific data. MDSplus is widely used in the fusion community. MDSplus is used to securely transfer data within the FusionGrid. Researchers interested in using FusionGrid should download the MDSplus software from http://www.mdsplus.org.
MDSplus is available from http://www.mdsplus.org.
The Globus Project is a research and development project focused on enabling the application of Grid concepts to scientific and engineering computing.
How do I obtain the Globus Toolkit?
The Globus Toolkit is available from http://www.globus.org/toolkit/. We distribute source code under an open source license that allows the software to be used and redistributed quite freely. Starting with the Globus Toolkit 2.0, we also distribute binary versions for popular platforms.
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