Section: Application Domains

Grid Computing

As distributed systems are becoming ubiquitous, Grid computing, and the more recently emerging close concept known as Cloud computing are facing a major challenge for computer science: seamless access and use of large-scale computing resources, world-wide. The word "Grid" was chosen by analogy with the electric power grid, which provides pervasive access to power and has had a dramatic impact on human capabilities and society. It is believed that by providing pervasive, dependable, consistent and inexpensive access to advanced computational capabilities, computational grids will have a similar transforming effect, allowing new classes of applications to emerge.

Another challenge is to use, for a given computation, unused CPU cycles of desktop computers in a Local Area Network. This is intranet Computational Peer-To-Peer.

There is a need for models and infrastructures for grid and peer-to-peer computing, and we promote a programming model based on communicating mobile objects and components.

In this domain, the OASIS team strongly contributed to the design standardisation and implementation of a Grid-oriented component model called GCM (Grid component model).