GRAND: toward scalability in a Grid environment

One of the challenges in Grid computing research is to provide a means to automatically submit, manage, and monitor applications whose main characteristic is to be composed of a large number of tasks. The large number of explicit tasks, generally placed on a centralized job queue, can cause several problems: (1) they can quickly exhaust the memory of the submission machine; (2) they can deteriorate the response time of the submission machine due to these demanding too many open ports to manage remote execution of each of the tasks; (3) they may cause network traffic congestion if all tasks try to transfer input and/or output files across the network at the same time; (4) they make it impossible for the user to follow execution progress without an automatic tool or interface; (5) they may depend on fault‐tolerance mechanisms implemented at application level to ensure that all tasks terminate successfully. In this work we present and validate a novel architectural model, GRAND (Grid Robust ApplicatioN Deployment), whose main objective is to deal with the submission of a large numbers of tasks. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.