Computational grids using light-trail WDM optical networking technology

Computational grids are the direct merger of communication and computation to facilitate emerging enterprise requirements such as distributed processing, IT virtualization etc. But lack of adequate technology in place to support such grids was hindrance to there becoming common place. Also there were very few applications which would have really benefited from such grids. In recent years with applications like some particle physics experiments require high processing powers and they are performed under international collaboration thus there is a need for re-thinking ways of network bandwidth allocation to accommodate such needs.; All these applications differ from traditional telecommunication applications in terms of their network as well as processing resource requirements. In the telecommunication applications it is almost always pre-determined the requirement of network bandwidth and other resources and these are somewhat statically allocated. But in the case of such high processing requirement applications there can never be a way to find out bandwidth requirements. Light trails with inherent properties of dynamic provisioning, optical multicasting and high bandwidth-low-latency emerge as an obvious choice.; Earlier grid scheduling algorithms tried to efficiently balance the processing loads across clusters based on the processing power available at individual nodes. This creates two layers of scheduling one is the load scheduler and the other is the network scheduler. Thus these algorithms treat the processing resource and the network resource as two distinct resources. The two are indeed two distinct resources but their scheduling is actually dependent on each other. That is a more loaded cluster is likely to send out more jobs to other nodes while a lightly loaded node will receive more load. Thus the scheduling of jobs will likely decide the network bandwidth requirements of a node. This thesis proposes one such scheduling algorithm which tries to combine load scheduler and network scheduler over a light-trail based WDM optical network.