Toward an Architecture for Ad Hoc Grids

The advantages offered by existing Grid frameworks have resulted in a wide range of applications adopting the Grid approach. The first generation of production Grids have focused on the creation of large virtual organizations that share high end resources as part of a static resource pool. However as many collaborative interactions take places on a sporadic or ad hoc fashion outside of the virtual organization, such Grids become impractical. In this paper, we outline an extension to the Grid architecture that addresses this issue. We refer to this architecture a as sporadic or ad hoc Grid. We discuss use cases that justify our efforts toward a self-organizing ad hoc Grid architecture. We outline the functional principles of this architecture and propose our framework to implement them.