Introduction

A Grid enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources including supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, and specialized devices owned by different organizations administered with different policies. Grids are typically used for solving large-scale resource and computing intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce. In the last few years, a number of exciting projects like Globus, Legion, and Condor, developed the software infrastructure needed for grid computing. Various distributed problems have been solved using these tools and libraries. However, operating system support for grid computing is minimal or non-existent. Though these tools have been developed with different goals, they use a common set of services provided by the existing operating system to achieve different abstractions.

GridOS provides operating system services that support grid computing. It makes writing middleware easier and provides services that make a normal commodity operating system like Linux more suitable for grid computing. The services are designed as a set of kernel modules that can be inserted and removed with ease. The modules provide mechanisms for

These modules are designed to be policy neutral, easy to use, consistent and clean. We have also developed modules on top of the above mentioned primary modules that provide high data transfer rates similar to GridFTP.

Major Modules and Structure of GridOS

GridOS design

Publications