An investigation of network support for grid middleware and applications

Owing to the rapidly growing interests and excitement in distributed computing and grid-enabled applications, the facilitating middleware layer has become a center of attention in recent years. At the same time, rapid advances in networking technologies such as the resilient packet ring (RPR) have evolved to carry all kinds of information including data, voice, multimedia and now, grid applications. However, little studies have been made to discover the interactions between grid middleware and the network layer. This paper therefore investigates the degree of which grid middleware design takes advantage of the underlying networking resources and features.