Recent developments in high-performance networks, computers, information servers, and display technologies make it feasible to design network-enabled tools that incorporate remote compute and information resources into local computational environments and collaborative environments that link people, computers, and databases into collaborative sessions. | Reprint from Concurrency Practice and Experience 10 7 1998 567-581 1998 John Wiley Sons Ltd. Minor changes to the original have been made to conform with house style. 4 Software infrastructure for the I-WAY high-performance distributed computing experiment Ian Foster Jonathan Geisler Bill Nickless Warren Smith and Steven Tuecke Argonne National Laboratory Argonne Illinois United States INTRODUCTION Recent developments in high-performance networks computers information servers and display technologies make it feasible to design network-enabled tools that incorporate remote compute and information resources into local computational environments and collaborative environments that link people computers and databases into collaborative sessions. The development of such tools and environments raises numerous technical problems including the naming and location of remote computational communication and data resources the integration of these resources into computations the location characterization and selection of available network connections the provision of security and reliability and uniform efficient access to data. Grid Computing - Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality. Edited by F. Berman A. Hey and G. Fox 2003 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBN 0-470-85319-0 102 IAN FOSTER ETAL. Previous research and development efforts have produced a variety of candidate point solutions 1 . For example DCE CORBA Condor 2 Nimrod 3 and Prospero 4 address problems of locating and or accessing distributed resources file systems such as AFS 5 DFS and Truffles 6 address problems of sharing distributed data tools such as Nexus 7 MPI 8 PVM 9 and Isis 10 address problems of coupling distributed computational resources and low-level network technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode ATM promise gigabit sec communication. However little work has been done to integrate these solutions in a way that satisfies the scalability performance functionality reliability and security .
