XtreemOS: Towards a grid-enabled linux-based operating system

Abstract

The term Grid computing was introduced at the end of 90s by Foster and Kesselman; it was envisioned as "an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing, innovative applications, and, in some cases, high-performance orientation" [1]. Defining Grids has always been difficult but nowadays there is a general agreement that Grids are distributed systems enabling the creation of Virtual Organizations (VOs) [2] in which users can share, select, and aggregate a wide variety of geographically distributed resources, owned by different organizations, for solving large-scale computational and data intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce. Those platforms may include any kind of computational resources like supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, sensors, and specialized devices. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.