WHP-0004 Grid Architectural Issues: State-of-the-art and Future Trends

Grid architecture is one of the cornerstones for successful development and proliferation of Grid computing. The scale, dynamism and openness of the Grid, together with demands on its reliability, security and manageability, pose unique challenges on software architecture. The main objective of the Architectural Issues Institute of the CoreGRID NoE is to perform a significant improvement of architectural designs of future Grids by focusing on three particular key aspects: scalability of resources, adaptability, and dependability of Grid architectures and services. These research directions address the mandatory architectural properties of the Next Generation Grids as identified by the NGG reports: simplicity, resilience, scalability of services, and straightforward administration and configuration management. This paper presents the current state-of-the-art on the research topics of the partners involved in the Architectural Issues Institute of the CoreGRID NoE, with special focus on scalable resource discovery, fault tolerance for Grid systems, and adaptability and performance predictions mechanisms for a self-manageable Grid infrastructure. A newly emerged area of research, the one of large-scale volunteer computing using desktop Grid platforms constitute an active area of research in this Institute. A significant problem is to render these platforms resilient to open up to commercial applications. Special focus is given to the future research trends on these topics as they emerge from the involvement of the CoreGRID partners.