GRIDS in Community Settings

Abstract

The authors have been running the second decade since the time that pioneers in Grid started to work on a technology which seemed similar to its predecessors but in reality it was envisioned totally divergent from them. Many years later, the grid technology has gone through various development stages yielding common solution mechanisms for similar categories of problems across interdisciplinary fields. Several new concepts like the Virtual Organization and Semantic Grid have been perfected bringing closer the day when the scientific communities will collaborate as if all their members were at the same location, working with the same laboratory equipment and running the same algorithms. Many production-scale standard-based middlewares have been developed to an excellent degree and have already started to produce significant scalability gains, which in the past, were considered unthinkable.