Customer Reviews

Grid Computing for Developers (Programming)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is preety darn good. I covers a broad range of grid topics such as: grid middleware, resource managers, schedulers, parallel computing with MPI, etc.
I specially liked the chapter on grid enabled portal development. It has helped me a lot at work. There is also a comprehensive guide to the Globus toolkit (GT3, GT4, WSRF) that is full of samples, transcripts and troubleshooting tips.

Overall, I think this book is a great tool for the grid engineer and developer.

Cheers.

Grid computing promises to be the next big wave in high performance computing. While the power of today's PC's has gotten relatively huge, easily passing the supercomputers of not so long ago, there are still certain applications in weather, nuclear physics, bioinformatics and other areas where far more computing power is needed.

The first step was to take a bunch of PC's and cluster them together to make a more powerful system. When these large massively parallel systems were built, it then became clear that taking several of these from around the country or even the world could produce 'systems' of considerably more power.

The answer was 'The Grid.' Funded by the US Government, work began several years ago to produce the basic tools needed to make Grid computing work. This book clearly explains, in a practical sense, what Grid computing has become today. It gives some background and description of grid computing. Then it goes into the software that has been written that enables the practical use of such systems.

The book is comprehensive enough that it could be used by students or administrators that are working with or even just considering using a grid architecture.

This book covers a lot of stuff! From installation transcripts for GT 2,3,4, scheduler installation, customization to Grid portal development. The book has little theory but I found some interesting numbers on the potential growth of the grid computing market over the next few years. It has a lot of source code and plenty of images to support it thus it is targeted to software engineers and developers involved on grid computing.

There is some complex math (related to large integer factorization) which is hard to understand for the novice but overall I give it five stars. All major protocols used by the globus toolkit are explained: resource allocation, data management, and security.

P.S: There is also a few chapters dedicated to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) with examples and some integration tips with the Globus Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM) which I found unique.

Vladimir Silva's GRID COMPUTING FOR DEVELOPERS tells of a promising new technology, exploring the evolution of Grid computing from early distributed computing ideas to its modern environment. From de facto standards for Grid computing to development guides for Grid services, commodity Grid kits for Java and Perl, and source code samples, A DEVELOPER'S GUIDE TO GRID COMPUTING is perfet for computer scientists who want a head start on the next generation of IT Grid computing.