Grid Meter » Grid Mobility -- Can You Hear Me Now?

August 24, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Grid Mobility -- Can You Hear Me Now?

TAGS: None

Yesterday I had the opportunity to catch up with Raj Kumar and Xiang Song from HP's research labs. They're working on an effort called "GridLite" -- a proof of concept Grid project that's exploring the boundaries of what it means for "lite" mobile devices to participate in a Grid. Mobile devices have legitimate resource constraints (limited storage, memory, compute cycles and so forth) that preclude them from participating in Grids, so it's a tricky problem these guys are trying to solve.

"But if businesses can access the Grid from a laptop or desktop -- they should also be able to access the Grid from a PDA, smartphone or other handheld device," said Kumar.

What Kumar's team has figured out over the last year-and-a-half is a new set of services (sitting above core services) that enable mobile devices to tap into the Grid infrastructure.

In the GridLite architecture, the clients (which include any ubiquitous device like iPaqs or cell phones) contact the server through a portal called GridLite Resource Manager (GRM). If the mobile user is working on an application, the data is brought to the user device, with a master copy kept in the Grid infrastructure. If the user needs to free up some storage on the device, they can flush some extra files to the Grid infrastructure in a seamless fashion. There is a policy engine that allows for thresholds where data moves back and forth from the Grid to the handheld devices, all based on the user's prompting. Predictive algorithms anticipate use of applications (based on recurring usage patterns) and potentially download applications on devices before the user request even occurs.

These are just a few of the really interesting new ways that the GridLite folks are Grid-enabling mobile devices. A big part of what they're doing is essentially providing an abstraction mechanism that gives the illusion of unlimited storage on the client (mobile device) side. One of the ongoing discussions / debates in Grid -- of course -- is where the intelligence should reside and where the compute should take place. When you're talking about "lite" clients (with the resource constraints mentioned above), the ultimate goal is to make data and storage resources appear local to the user, and to remove any latency or performance issues.

I think these guys are onto something really cool ... I'm very impressed by the progress they've made. We also had some preliminary discussions about some work that they're doing with the open source Globus Toolkit on Grid-enabled mobile devices. I hope to circle back and discuss that further within the next few weeks -- and also to touch on the authentication / authorization issues that the GridLite team is working on with Grid-enabled mobile devices.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the GridLite project, here's a link to a research paper you might find helpful.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on August 24, 2005 09:22 AM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: