A democratic Grid: collaboration, sharing and computing for everyone

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated vision, architecture, middleware and applications of a public and large scale Grid for everyone: supporting collaboration for groups of people who can interact and share work and share or trade computing resources among them. This public Grid is decentralized and self-adapting to the dynamics of the online world with networks, computers and people who come and go, fail and recover and applications with varying loads and resource needs. Initial evaluation based on the first release of the middleware components and applications shows how our Grid can operate in a dynamic and decentralized environment by a combination of pooling and market mechanisms that adapt supply and demand for resources, self-managing services and applications that react to environmental changes and generic data-sharing services for concurrent write-sharing. The potential for societal impact is enormous as it can open Grid computing and collaboration to everyone on the Internet.