Clouds and grids

 

An EGEE Comparative study:

Clouds and grids - evolution or revolution?

This report compares grid and cloud computing services, taking a practical look at implementations of both: namely the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project for grid and the Amazon Web Service (AWS) for cloud. Taking performance, scale, ease of use, costs, functionality and other aspects into consideration, the report looks at the overall opportunity that converging cloud and grid services can bring to users.

An EGEE Comparative study:

Clouds and grids: Evolution or Revolution?

This report compares grid and cloud computing services, taking a practical look at implementations of both: namely the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project for grid and the Amazon Web Service (AWS) for cloud. Taking performance, scale, ease of use, costs, functionality and other aspects into consideration, the report looks at the overall opportunity that converging cloud and grid services can bring to users.
Cloud computing is picking up momentum as the next "big thing" in computing. In contrast grid has passed the peak of the new technology hype and is now in production usage. Due to the commonality between the technologies underlying grid and cloud, a question might be "will cloud computing make grid obsolete?" Yet, as this report explains, a better question should be "how can users benefit from the developments around cloud computing to extend and simplify their grid utilisation."
The EGEE grid infrastructure federates existing computing resources spanning many sites, countries and continents. It is an infrastructure of independently administered heterogeneous resources with distributed multi-science user communities, and is mostly publicly funded including an important contribution from the European Commission. EGEE offers high-level services that allow its user communities to collaborate and contribute resources to common scientific challenges.
The Amazon commercial cloud offering includes two flagship services: Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). EC2 relies on hardware virtualization. Using a simple interface, the user provides as input a virtual image (stored on S3) as well as input data and the resources are allocated as required. S3 is a simple service for storing and accessing data on the Amazon cloud, using technologies such as REST, HTTP, SOAP and BitTorrent.

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