The Vega Personal Grid: A Lightweight Grid Architecture

Grid computing has emerged as a technology to solve the problem of sharing and cooperating of computational resources in wide area. In this paper, we propose a Grid architecture called Vega Personal Grid (the Vega PG). The key feature of the Vega PG is that it is a usercentered lightweight Grid architecture. We make a mapping between traditional computer systems and the Vega PG, which comprises Grid virtual hardware, Grid operating system and Grid User Environment. The Grid virtual hardware comprises various resources distributed in wide area. The Grid operating system (GOS) is a middleware based on the Grid virtual hardware and responsible for the management of the virtual hardware and the activities of the computations in a Grid. The Grid User Environment comprises several software tools enabling end users to utilize Grid resources conveniently. We also propose four important principles, which are Versatile Services, Enabling Intelligence, Global Uniformity and Autonomous Control, to evaluate the architecture design of the Vega PG.