Cloud Computing and Grid

Computing 360-Degree Compared

Rashid Tahir

Then to now!
1961: John McCarthy predicts that Computation
may someday be organized as a public utility
Mid 1990s: the term Grid is coined by the
community
2002: Ian Foster publishes a grid checklist.
July 2002: Amazon launches its AWS.
Subsequent Years: Large-scale federated systems
such as TeraGrid, Open Science Grid etc. are
developed.
Definitions!!
Grid Computing:
The ability, using a set of open standards and
protocols, to gain access to applications and data,
processing power, storage capacity and a vast array
of other computing resources over the Internet. A
grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that
enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of
resources distributed across multiple administrative
domains based on their (resources) availability,
capacity, performance, cost and users quality-of-
service requirements.
1
1- IBM Solutions Grid for Business Partners: Helping IBM Business Partners to Grid-enable applications for
the next phase of e-business on demand

Characteristics of a Grid
Coordinates resources that are not subject to
centralized control
Uses standard, open, general-purpose
protocols and interfaces
Delivers non-trivial qualities of service
Definitions!!
Cloud Computing:
A large-scale distributed computing paradigm that is
driven by economies of scale, in which a pool of
abstracted, virtualized, dynamically-scalable,
managed computing power, storage, platforms, and
services are delivered on demand to external
customers over the Internet.
Characteristics of a Cloud
Massively scalable
Can be encapsulated as an abstract entity that
delivers different levels of services to
customers outside the Cloud
Driven by economies of scale
Can be dynamically configured (via
virtualization or other approaches) and
delivered on demand
The BIG Question!!!
Is Cloud Computing just a new name for Grid?

YES: The vision is the same.
BUT NO: The approach is different.
NEVERTHELESS, YES: The problem space, both
paradigms attempt to solve, is overlapping.
Why cloud computing?
Exponentially growing data size in scientific
instrumentation/simulation and Internet
publishing and archiving
Wide spread adoption of Computing Services and
Web 2.0 applications
Rapid decrease in hardware cost and increase in
computing power and storage capacity, and the
advent of multi-core architecture and modern
supercomputers consisting of hundreds of
thousands of cores
Relationship between Clouds and other domains it
overlaps with

Side-by-Side: Grids vs. Clouds
Six comparison metrics:
Business Model
Architecture
Resource Management
Programming Model
Application Model
Security Model
Business Model

CLOUD GRID
On-demand pay-per-use type
Model
Services are charged usually on
the basis of per instance-hour, per
GB-Month of storage, per
TB/Month data transfer etc
Project-oriented Model
Users pool resources that are
shared by the community
Each Grid site is responsible for
maintaining their own set of
resources
Architecture

GRID
Grids provide protocols and services at five different layers
1. Fabric Layer: Provides access to different resource types such as
compute, storage and network resource, code repository etc.
2. Connectivity Layer: Defines core communication and
authentication protocols for easy and secure network
transactions.
3. Resource Layer: Defines protocols for the publication, discovery,
negotiation, monitoring, accounting and payment of sharing
operations on individual resources.
4. Collective Layer: Captures interactions across collections of
resources.
5. Application Layer: Comprises whatever user applications built on
top of the above protocols and APIs and operate in VO (Virtual
Organization) Environments.
Architecture

CLOUD
Clouds architecture can be divided in to four different layers:
1. Fabric Layer: Contains the raw hardware level resources.
2. Unified Resource Layer: Contains resources that have been
abstracted/encapsulated (usually by virtualization) so that they
can be exposed to upper layer.
3. Platform Layer: Adds on a collection of specialized tools,
middleware and services on top of the unified resources.
4. Application Layer: Contains the applications that would run in the
Clouds.
Architecture
Grids vs Clouds
Architecture

CLOUD
Clouds provide services at three different levels:
1. IaaS: Provisions hardware, software, and equipments to deliver
software application environments with a resource usage-based
pricing model.
2. PaaS: Offers a high-level integrated environment to build, test,
and deploy custom applications.
3. SaaS: Delivers special-purpose software that is remotely
accessible by consumers through the Internet with a usage-based
pricing model.
Together the three are referred to as the Cloud Computing Onion.
Cloud Computing Onion

Resource Management
Comparison based on the following metrics:
Compute Model
Data Model
Data Locality
Combining Compute and Data Management
Virtualization
Monitoring
Provenance
Resource Management

CLOUD GRID
Compute
Model
Users simultaneous share resources
and are serviced instantly
Queuing based batch-scheduled model

Data Model Current data model houses the data
inside the cloud however in the
future this could change

Specially designed Data-Grids along
with metadata catalogs that keep track
of the location of each piece of data
Data Locality High focus on storing and replicating
data near the associated compute
unit
Data is stored in shared file systems
where data locality can not easily be
applied. However data-aware
schedulers dramatically improve
performance
Combining
Compute and
Data
Management
Initially clouds were not used much
for data-intensive applications so not
much work had been done to
manage large amounts of data over
compute resources. However this
has changed substantially now
Grids achieve this well because of the
usage of data-aware schedulers to
schedule jobs close to the node
responsible for computing them
Resource Management

CLOUD GRID
Virtualization Highly virtualized to meet service
level agreements. Abstractions
provided at each layer to assist the
process of virtualization
Little or no support for
virtualization

Monitoring Since services provided are layer-
specific, monitoring information is
not provided for the entire system
Users have greater flexibility
over the resources they are
allocated and hence can deploy
fine grained monitoring
infrastructure
Provenance Still an under-explored area
however given that clouds are
increasingly being used for e-science
research new provenance systems
are emerging fast
Since Grids are project
oriented, provenance is
essential and therefore Grids
provide a lot of support for this
Programming Model

CLOUD GRID
Most common parallel programming
model is MapReduce
Standard parallel programming models
are also used
Scripting is used in place of workflow
management systems
Clouds have generally adopted Web
Services APIs for providing services
over the web.
The most commonly used parallel
programming model is based on
message passing
Less used models employ coordination
languages that allow heterogeneous
components to coordinate and interact
In a recent effort to develop a service
oriented Grid programming model the
community has started using WSRF
(Web Services Resource Framework)
Workflow Management Systems are
used when processing large sets of data
involving complex tasks
Application Model

CLOUD GRID
Cloud computing is still in its infancy so
the app space has not yet been clearly
understood however one can
characterize most applications as
loosely coupled
All three layers mentioned previously
provide their own set of functionalities
and applications and tools are being
developed that exploit these
functionalities
Grids support a wide variety of
applications such as High Performance
Computing (HPC) and High Throughput
Computing (HTC) apps
Tightly coupled applications make use
of the Message Passing Interface (MPI)
for inter-process communication
whereas loosely coupled apps rely on
Workflow Management Systems
Another emerging set of apps are the
scientific gateways apps. These provide
a large variety of services through a
browser-based user interface
Security Model

CLOUD GRID
Clouds mostly comprise dedicated data
centers with most of the infrastructure
homogeneous in nature however when
cross-data center interaction occurs
compatibility issues arise
Clouds seem to have relatively simpler
and less secure security models
Security is the biggest obstruction to
the wide scale adoption of cloud
computing
Grids are built under the assumption
that the shared resources will be
mostly heterogeneous in nature and
hence are better equipped for
challenges pertaining to
interoperability and compatibility
Since each Grid site has operational
autonomy, they have security
engineered in to them by the
administrators
Security model is more complex as
compared to Clouds and perhaps more
time consuming too
Conclusion
Clouds and Grids share a common vision and
have overlapping architecture, technology and
application space. However they take different
steps to provide scalable distributed on-demand
computation resulting in the evolution of two
parallel infrastructures. Tomorrows distributed
systems will need to have the centralized scale
of todays Cloud utilities and the distribution
and interoperability of todays Grid facilities.
Discussion Questions
Is Cloud computing the same as Grid computing? Why? Why
not?
What does the future entail for each of these paradigms? Can
you see a unified distributed paradigm in the future? Why?
Why not?
Will the community shift more or more towards Clouds and
Grids or do you envision a future where high-end desktop
machines will dominate the market?
Do you think Clouds and Grids are reliable enough to be
trusted with sensitive data and computation?
Currently Clouds cant guarantee reliability, security and
control however they provide ease of access, portability etc at
a very low cost. Do you think the benefits outweigh the costs?
References
1- Cloud Computing and Grid Computing 360 Degree
Compared
Authors: Ian Foster, Yong Zhao, Ioan Raicu, Shiyong Lu
This paper appears in: Grid Computing Environments Workshop,
2008. GCE '08