Dear All,

Here some recent updates on Your Grid Computing Info Centre @ gridcomputing.com
and the Gridbus Project - www.gridbus.org:
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1. Google rates our Grid Info Centre as #1 out of 2,340,000 pages.
Just type "grid computing" in google search box and click on "I'm Feeling
Lucky",
you will know what I mean! It is all due to your trust in our info centre.
Thank you all 813 members.

2. The Gridbus Project: Status and Collaboration Invitation
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As you know the Gridbus Project has been developing a computational
economy/market-based
Grid technologies that helps in creating a service-oriented computing
architecture
where service providers offer paid services associated with a particular
application and
users, based on their requirements, would optimize by selecting the services
they require
and can afford within their budget. To realize this scenario, the Gridbus
project is
actively pursuing research in the design and development of open source cluster
and grid
middleware technologies for utility and service-oriented computing. These
include visual
Grid application development tools for rapid creation of distributed
applications,
competitive economy-based Grid scheduler, cooperative economy-based cluster
scheduler,
Web-services based Grid market directory (GMD), Grid accounting services,
Gridscape for
creation of dynamic and interactive testbed portals, G-monitor portal for
web-based
management of Grid applications execution, and the widely used GridSim toolkit
for
performance evaluation. Recently, the Gridbus Project has developed a
.NET-based
clustering and Grid web services framework, called Alchemi, to support the
integration of
both Windows and Unix-class resources for Grid computing.

We recently wrote an extended report that briefly highlights Gridbus Project
activities
and status of tools developed. An abstract is enclosed below and full report can
be
downloaded from: http://www.gridbus.org/papers/gridbus2004.pdf

The Gridbus Project welcomes your comments and contributions in the form of (a)
extending
Gridbus Tools, (b) maintaining them, (c) actively involve in our new efforts in
creating
"Grid Exchange", which looks like Stock Exchange for Grid Computing. For further
information on Gridbus activities, please the project website -
http://www.gridbus.org
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3. WS-Resource Framework (WSRF):
As you know to develop low-level grid middleware using Web Services
technologies,
GGF (global grid forum) proposed some extensions to Web services and created
Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI). It is good see that these extensions
are slowing becoming part of Web services standards through a new activity
called
WS-Resource Framework (WSRF). More..see - http://www.globus.org/wsrf/
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4. Grid 2004: Call for Papers
5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing (Grid 2004) has issued
a Call for Papers. Please encourage your friends and colleagues to submit papers
to it.
For further information, pls see - http://www.gridbus.org/grid2004/


5. CCGrid 2004 in Chicago, April 19-22, 2004:
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The CCGrid 2004 (http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/ccgrid2004/) is all set to be held in
Chicago
next week. I plan to be there from April 17-22. If any of are going to be in
Chicago
during this time or living there, please let me know. It will be great to meet
you
in person and discuss. Of course, I will be more than happy to host a dinner for
you
in one of the Indian restaurants in Chicago!
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Please feel free to share this Grid Info informal newsletter.

Thank you very much for your support!

cheers
Raj



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Title: The Gridbus Toolkit for Service Oriented Grid and Utility Computing: An
Overview and Status Report
Authors: Rajkumar Buyya and Srikumar Venugopal
Comments: 11 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables
Report-no: Technical Report, GRIDS-TR-2004-2, Grid Computing and Distributed
Systems Laboratory, University of Melbourne, Australia, April 2004
Subj-class: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
ACM-class: C.2.4, C.1.4, C.2.1
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Grids aim at exploiting synergies that result from cooperation of autonomous
distributed entities. The synergies that result from grid cooperation include
the sharing, exchange, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed
resources such as computers, data bases, software, and scientific instruments
for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. For
this cooperation to be sustainable, participants need to have economic
incentive. Therefore, "incentive" mechanisms should be considered as one of key
design parameters of Grid architectures. In this article, we present an
overview and status of an open source Grid toolkit, called Gridbus, whose
architecture is fundamentally driven by the requirements of Grid economy.
Gridbus technologies provide services for both computational and data grids
that power the emerging eScience and eBusiness applications.
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