The development of Grid Computing began in the mid 1990s. The idea is to make available different computing resources, data resources, and other computer-related expertise on a computational Grid in order to realize scientific projects that would otherwise be impossible or not practical at a single computing site. One could envision, for example, thousands of scientists in many different locations in the world pooling their resources to analysis the data of a major experiment at the European high energy physics laboratory in CERN, Switzerland (The European Dat Gridhttp://www.eu-datagrid.org. Another scenario would involve the coupling of codes developed at different sites each with specific expertises.
Grid Computing is a difficult challenge because the needed technology was not initially available. Progress continues as technology improves and more developers work on the project. The wide-spread acceptance of Grid computing was evident at the Globus World 2003 Conference attended by more than 500 Grid engineers representing 25 countries; a two-fold increase from the same conference held in 2002.
The MecaGRID project started in the fall 2002 is sponsered by the French Ministry of Research through the ACI-Grid programhttp://www.recherche.gouv.fr/recherche/aci/grid.htm. The purpose of the MecaGRID project is to provide the Province-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (PACA) region with a means to make large parallel computations in fluid mechanics using hundreds of processors. This possibility can be realized by creating a large computational Grid comprised of clusters at the different sites in the PACA region. The initial phase of the MecaGRID brings together the clusters at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, CEMEF (Centre de mise en forme des matériaux de l'Ecole des Mines de Paris-Sophia Antipolis), and the IUSTI (Institut Universitaire des Systèmes Thermiques et Industriels) in Marseilles - see Guillard [#!guillard1!#]. In the preliminary stage of development of the MecaGRID project, the i-cluster of INRIA Rhone Alpes was included in the pool of machines available to the MecaGRID community. Each partner has their own different scenarios as to how they would use the increased capability provided by the MecaGRID.
Even though Grid Computing has been under development for almost a decade, the challenges involved in creating computational Grids are many and today near plug-and-play software exists only for special types of Grid Computing like Desktop Computing and Enterprise Grids which are simplified by being located at a single site with local networks and local administrators. Plug-and-play software does not yet exist for what are known as Virtual Organizations (VO) Grids like the MecaGRID. VOs are institutions or groups that are totally independent entities. However, Grid software like the Globus Alliance softwarehttp://www.globus.org is sufficiently developed to permit the creation of VO Grids over a 1-2 month period under proper conditions. The proper conditions are on the human side rather than the software side and can be the most difficult to resolve even among partners.
VO Grids are difficult for many reasons. First, the computing resources are located at different institutions usually in different geographical locations. The institutions are independent of each other, having their own priorities, system administrators, batch systems, queue priorities, security procedures, hardware and user constituency. Changes at any particular VO site are made in a timely manner as the changes are under control of a local system administrator. The major reason why creating VO Grids is difficult is the absence of a Grid administrator to plan, establish benchmarks, and coordinate the local systems administrators (LSAs). See Wornom [#!wornom1!#] for further discussion of the challenges encountered in creating the MecaGRID.