Grid computing is a promising emerging technology that is growing in mindshare and relevance in the industry. Applications that take advantage of grids are under development in both academic and commercial organizations. You can find many definitions of Grid computing, but the essence of the grid is the federation of computing resources to accelerate application processing, plus the virtualization of these resources. At its core, the grid is all about distributed computing and resource management.

A wide array of heterogeneous resources comprise a grid, and it's important that they interact and behave in well-known and consistent ways. The need for open standards that define this interaction and encourage interoperability between components supplied from different sources was the motivation for the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), specified by the Open Grid Services Infrastructure working group of the Global Grid Forum (GGF) in June 2002. In this article, we lay out the components of OGSA and explain their significance. The Globus Toolkit 3 is the first major implementation of the standard; others are under development.

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