Grid Computing Infrastructure Architecture Document

The Linux Kernel Architecture

What Will Be Special In Grid Enabled Secure Linux Kernel

Since we are looking at a heavy network based system we can also put special emphasis on the protocols used.

The processing power and networking performance has increasing with time. Although the performance available today seems satisfactory for the applications written a few years ago, this increase does not reflect the rate of increase in the needs for the computational power of different complex  scientific and numerical systems for solving the problems such as high energy physics, bioinformatics and simulation of computational modeling.

There are currently two communication options available to applications running in a distributed system environment: In-Kernel protocols and User Level Protocols.

In-kernel protocol such as version of TCP built into the operating system, are traditional way to provide communication protocols. Although these are inflexible to some extent (applications cannot modify or specialize these directly), these are highly efficient for particular use.

User level protocols were proposed in order to provide a flexible way of communication. The idea is that all communication code is placed outside the operating system, and each application can have its own communication protocol which it can optimize to its needs.

User level communication is an excellent way of application to achieve flexibility in communication but it limits both the functionality and performance available to applications. On the other hand, In-Kernel protocols suffer from inflexibility and complexity (since applications cannot modify or specialize them).

 

Our Approach 

·           Our approach is to provide the In-Kernel protocols with the flexibility of User Level Protocols. This will be done through loadable modules in the Linux kernel. We will provide a powerful programming model for grid applications to control their communication needs. This approach will not only provide the hardware level network performance but also the flexibility of user level protocols to be changeable and reconfigurable according to one's requirements.

 

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