Causal-Ordered Transport Service for Real-time Grid Applications on Internet

Abstract

Grid computing is a state-of-the-art parallel computing technology which enables the worldwide computers to dynamically share their computing powers and resource to each other. The grid takes advantage of Internet as a universal communication platform to carry messages. Basically, Internet doesn't guarantee loss-free and ordered transmission, hence, the grid should keep the cause and effect of events by itself for the correct order of command invocation in the remote hosts. The ordering issue arises when the messages travel across the networks with unpredictable delay. Recent researches study the security and resource control issues, but doesn't address the requirements of transport layer on the grid communication platform. In this paper, we propose a Causal-Ordering System (COS) for the grid applications and implement it to study the performance issues when the grid is built over worldwide networks. The COS provides a novel service model to the applications with time-sensitive and causal-ordered transport. From our experiments, the design of the grid middleware should use a causal-ordered, time-sensitive transportation rather than TCP. Our research will be beneficial to the improvement of the grid computing and can provide wealthy empirical results for the designer.