Motivations

A (Grid) computation requires three kinds of resources: Storage, Computing, and Communication resources.

The current model of a Grid, especially for what is concerning monitoring and optimization, concentrates on storage and computing resources.

Their identifiers are called Storage and Computing Entities.

The understanding of their characteristics is sufficiently precise to be translated into databased contents, and used for early experiments in optimization.

Modeling communication resources, that we connect with Communication Entities, is more complicate, and there is little agreement about what they exactly are...

...but this appears to be a corner stone!

One way is to introduce higher level functional topologies, but we suspect that this might introduce restriction in the grid structure.

Here we try to understand these implications, in order to evaluate if they are acceptable, and we introduce a uniform terminology.

Next: The topology of the Grid: Theodolite Services

GGF6 --- October 14-17, 2002

Index