Collegenote
- Defining the Cloud
- Cloud Computing
- Emergence of Cloud Computing
- Cloud Based Service Models
- Grid Computing or Cloud Computing
- Components of Cloud Computing
- Cloud Computing Deployment Models
- Benefits of using cloud models
- Legal Issues in Using Cloud Models
- Ethical issues in cloud computing
- Characteristics of Cloud Computing
- Evolution of cloud computing
- Challenges for cloud computing
- Grid Computing
- Distributed Computing in Grid and Cloud
- Cloud Communication
- Communication-as-a-Service (CaaS)
- Advantages of CaaS
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
- Popular IaaS solutions
- Modern On-Demand Computing
- Amazon’s Elastic Cloud
- Amazon EC2 Service Characteristics
- Elastic IP Addressing
- Monitoring-as-a-Service (MaaS)
- The Traditional On-Premises Model
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
- Key Characteristics of PaaS
- Software-as-a-Service
- SaaS Implementation Issues
- The key characteristics of SaaS
- Benefits of SaaS Model
- Jericho Cube Model
- XaaS
- Evolution from Managed service providers (MSP) to Cloud Computing
- Single Purpose architectures to multi-purpose architectures
- Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)
- Combining Cloud and SOA
- Characterizing SOA
- Open Source Software in Data Centers
- Data center virtualization
- Cloud data center
Distributed Computing in Grid and Cloud #
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal.
Distributed computing also refers to the use of distributed systems to solve computational problems. In distributed computing, a problem is divided into many tasks, each of which is solved by one or more computers, which communicate with each other by message passing.
The word distributed in terms such as "distributed system", "distributed programming", and "distributed algorithm" originally referred to computer networks where individual computers were physically distributed within some geographical area. The terms are nowadays used in a much wider sense, even referring to autonomous processes that run on the same physical computer and interact with each other by message passing. While there is no single definition of a distributed system, the following defining properties are commonly used:
- There are several autonomous computational entities, each of which has its own local memory.
- The entities communicate with each other by message passing Parallel Vs. Distributed Computing
Distributed systems are groups of networked computers, which have the same goal for their work. The terms "concurrent computing", "parallel computing", and "distributed computing" have a lot of overlap, and no clear distinction exists between them. The same system may be characterized both as "parallel" and "distributed"; the processors in a typical distributed system run concurrently in parallel. Parallel computing may be seen as a particular tightly coupled form of distributed computing, and distributed computing may be seen as a loosely coupled form of parallel computing. Nevertheless, it is possible to roughly classify concurrent systems as "parallel" or "distributed" using the following criteria:
- In parallel computing, all processors may have access to a shared memory to exchange information between processors.
- In distributed computing, each processor has its own private memory (distributed memory). Information is exchanged by passing messages between the processors.
The figure below illustrates the difference between distributed and parallel systems. Figure(a) is a schematic view of a typical distributed system; as usual, the system is represented as a network topology in which each node is a computer and each line connecting the nodes is a communication link. Figure (b) shows the same distributed system in more detail: each computer has its own local memory, and information can be exchanged only by passing messages from one node to another by using the available communication links. Figure (c) shows a parallel system in which each processor has a direct access to a shared memory.
The last decade, the term 'Grid' has been a key topic in the field of high performance/distributed computing. The Grid has emerged as a new field of distributed computing, focusing on secure sharing of computational and storage resources among dynamic sets of people and organizations who own these resources. This sharing of resources can give people not only computational capabilities and data storage capabilities that cannot be provided by a single supercomputing center, but it also allows them to share data in a transparent way.
Grid Computing can be defined as applying resources from many computers in a network to a single problem, usually one that requires a large number of processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.
At its core, Grid Computing enables devices-regardless of their operating characteristics-to be virtually shared, managed and accessed across an enterprise, industry or workgroup. This virtualization of resources places all of the necessary access, data and processing power at the fingertips of those who need to rapidly solve complex business problems, conduct compute-intensive research and data analysis, and operate in real-time.
Distributed computing was one of the first real instances of cloud computing. Long before Google or Amazon, there was SETI@Home. Proposed in 1995 and launched in 1999, this program uses the spare capacity of internet connected machines to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This is sort of the cloud in reverse.
A more recent example would be software like Hadoop. Written in Java, Hadoop is a scalable, efficient, distributed software platform designed to process enormous amounts of data. Hadoop can scale to thousands of computers across many clusters.
Distributed computing is nothing more than utilizing many networked computers to partition (split it into many smaller pieces) a question or problem and allow the network to solve the issue piecemeal.
Another instance of distributed computing, for storage instead of processing power, is bittorrent. A torrent is a file that is split into many pieces and stored on many computers around the internet. When a local machine wants to access that file, the small pieces are retrieved and rebuilt.
As the cloud computing buzzword has evolved, distributed computing has fallen out of that particular category of software. Even though distributed computing might take advantage of the internet, it doesn’t follow the other tenants of cloud computing, mainly the automatic and instant scalability of resources.
That’s not to say that a distributed system couldn’t be built to be a cloud environment. Bittorrent, or any P2P system, comes very close to a cloud storage. It would require some additional protections like file ownership and privacy across all nodes but it could probably be done. Privacy like that is not quite what P2P is all about though.
The Cloud Computing paradigm originates mainly from research on distributed computing and virtualization, as it is based on principles, techniques and technologies developed in these areas.