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3 Ad Hoc Grid Aspects
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Ad Hoc Grid Aspects
There are certain requirements that a Grid environment needs to fulfil in order to be
suitable for Ad Hoc Grids. These are outlined in this main section of the report and the
Grid middleware ProActive [15] is chosen for the planned implementation of a Grid-
based parallel simulator because it fulfils the requirements mentioned.
3.1 Considerations
In section 2.1.1 Ad Hoc Grids where described as dynamic, spontaneous and transient
resource sharing infrastructures. The dynamic and transient structure of Ad Hoc Grids
and the fact that Ad Hoc Grids should only have a minimal administrative overhead
compared to traditional Grids creates special requirements that a Grid environment
needs to fulfil in order to be suitable for Ad Hoc Grids. These requirements include
automatic service deployment, service migration, fault tolerance and the discovery of
resources.
3.1.1 Service Deployment
In a traditional Grid environment the deployment of Grid services is performed by an
administrative authority that is also responsible for the usage policy and the monitoring
of the Grid services. Grid services are usually deployed by installing a service factory
onto the nodes. A service is then instantiated by calling the service factory for that
service which will return a handle to the newly created service instance. In traditional
Grid environments the deployment of service factories requires special access
permissions and is performed by administrators.
Because of their dynamically changing structure Ad Hoc Grids need different ways of
deploying Grid services that impose less administrative overhead. Automatic or hot
service deployment has been suggested as a possible solution [10]. A Grid environment
suitable for Ad Hoc Grids will have to provide means of installing services onto nodes
either automatically or with very little administrative overhead.