GRID introduction

GRID computing is becoming more and more important in both computer science community and theoretic science community. Traditional science fields (physics, biology...) have huge amount of data to be processed so that computer resources owned by a single organization can not satisfy the requirements. So grid computing was come up with to solve the problem.

Currently, most promising grid middleware includes: Globus, GLite, Unicore, Crown, (OpenPBS, LSF).
Condor is also a good distributed computing project which is widely used.
Globus is based on OGSA(Open Grid Services Architecture).

OMII-Europe aims to provide key software componenets for building e-inforastructure. Currently, it focuses on providing common interfaces and integration of major Grid software infrastructures. Its goals include interoperability of gLite/UNICORE/Globus/CROWNgrid.

ProActive is an Open Source Java library (LGPL) for parallel, distributed, and multi-threaded computing, also featuring mobility and security in a uniform framework. With a reduced set of simple primitives, ProActive provides a comprehensive toolkit that simplifies the programming of applications distributed on Local Area Networks (LANs), Clusters, Internet Grids and Peer-to-Peer Intranets.
ProActive deploys applications seamlessly on Local Area Networks (LANs), Wide Area Network (WAN), desktops, clusters, parallel machines, and data-centers, using de facto industry standards such as LSF, PBS, Globus and Unicore, or just ssh. ProActive does not require intrusive installation and enterprise IT infrastructure to be modified.