Semantics-Based Resource Discovery in Large-Scale Grids

With the present ubiquitous network connections and the growing computational and storage capabilities of modern everyday-use computers, more resources, such as PCs, handheld devices (e.g., PDAs and sensors), applications, and services are on grid networks. Grid is expected to evolve from a computing and data management facility to a pervasive, world-wide resource-sharing infrastructure. To fully utilize the wide range of grid resources, effective resource discovery mechanisms are required. However, resource discovery in a global-scale grid is challenging due to the considerable diversity, large number, dynamic behavior, and geographical distribution of the resources. The resource discovery technology required to achieve the ambitious global grid vision is still in its infancy, and existing applications have difficulties in achieving both rich searchability and good scalability. In this chapter, we investigate the resource discovery problem for open-networked global-scale grids. In particular, we propose a distributed semantics-based discovery framework. Moreover, we show how this framework can be used to address the discovery problem in such grids and improve three aspects of performance: expressiveness, scalability, and efficiency.