Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Workload distribution system (grid engine)
Virtual server containers
Commodity hardware infrastructure
Fig. 2.2
Exploitation of virtualization technology in the architecture of cloud computing
Autonomic computing aims at building computing systems capable of self-
management, which means being able to operate under defined general policies and
rules without human intervention. The goal of autonomic computing is to overcome
the rapidly growing complexity of computer system management, while being
able to keep increasing interconnectivity and integration unabated [
161
]. Although
cloud computing exhibits certain similarities to automatic computing the way that it
interconnects and integrates distributed data centers across continents, its objective
somehow is to lower the resource cost rather than to reduce system complexity.
Grid Computing
Grid computing is a distributed computing paradigm that coordinates networked
resources to achieve a common computational objective. The development of
grid computing was originally driven by scientific applications which are usually
computation-intensive, but applications requiring the transfer and manipulation of a
massive quantity of data was also able to take advantage of the grids [
142
,
143
,
171
].
Cloud computing appears to be similar to grid computing in the way that it also
employs distributed resources to achieve application-level objectives. However,
cloud computing takes one step further by leveraging virtualization technologies
to achieve on-demand resource sharing and dynamic resource provisioning.
