Grid4All: Open market places for democratic grids

Abstract

The Grid4All project is focused on the provision of the benefits and opportunities of Grids for everyone, including small organizations such as schools, families, non-governmental organizations, or small businesses. This involves multiple relevant and related aspects despite the scale of the global system: (i) self-management of applications as they adapt to environmental changes, (ii) the complexity of developing and using applications in that situation by multiple users, (iii) and the need to organize, govern, and regulate the community. Grid4All promotes the concept of a democratic Grid, virtual organizations and self-management systems, based on decentralized overlays. Thereby, the providers offer resources and services either for a shared-interest within a virtual organization (pooling) or for an open market across virtual organizations. These two models of distributing resources that co-exist locally, contribute to achieve global regulation. We propose an architecture according to these ideas, which are inspired by real-world cases, which include a collection of data sharing and execution services, used by collaborative applications. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.