UNIT I : INTRODUCTION (2 marks)

UNIT I : INTRODUCTION
1. State High Performance Computing (HPC)?
HPC: use of parallel processing to execute large programs quickly; often equated
to supercomputers, typically applied to systems generating teraflops (1012) or more. Emphasis:
raw speed performance and accuracy
2. State High Throughput Computing (HTC)?
HTC: running a job that takes days to complete, or an application that must produce a
high number of completed operations per unit of time. Performance measured in flops per
month or year, as opposed to per second.eg high-flux computing is in Internet searches and
web services, Emphasis: batch processing speed, cost, energy savings, security, and reliability.
3. Define Moores law?
Moores law indicates that processor speed doubles every 18 months.
4. What are computational grids?
A computational grid is hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable,
consistent, pervasive and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities.
5. What is meant by grid infrastructure?
Grid infrastructure is a complex combination of a number of capabilities and resources
identified for the specific problem and environment being addressed. It forms the core
foundations for successful grid applications.
6. What are the derivatives of grid computing?
There are 8 derivatives of grid computing. They are as follows:
a) Compute grid
b) Data grid
c) Science grid
d) Access grid
e) Knowledge grid
f) Cluster grid
g) Terra grid
h) Commodity grid
7. What are the grid computing applications?
Application partitioning that involves breaking the problem into discrete pieces.
Discovery and scheduling of tasks and workflow. Data communications distributing the
problem data where and when it is required.
8. Define Cluster computing:
Cluster is local to the domain and constructed to solve inadequate computing power. It
is related to the pooling of computational resources to provide more computing power by
parallel execution of the workload.
9. Define SOA.
Service oriented architecture is intended to define loosely coupled and interoperable
services applications, and to define process for integrating these interoperable components. In

SOA, the system is decomposed into a collection of network-connected components.

Applications and resources within a SOA shouldnt be built as a tightly coupled monolithic
model. Rather; these applications are composed dynamically from the deployed and available
services in the network.
10. What are the business areas needs in Grid computing?

Life Sciences

Financial services

Higher Education

Engineering Services

Government

Collaborative games
11. Write the any three Grid Applications.
Schedulers
Resource Broker
Load Balancing
12. What are the two most important technologies for building semantic webs?
XML
Resource Description Framework(RDF)
13. What is meant by Virtual Machines?
Virtual machines (VMs) offer novel solutions to underutilized resources, application
inflexibility, and software manageability, and security concerns in existing physical machines.
14. What are the business benefits in Grid Computing?
Acceleration of implementation time frames in order to intersect with the anticipated business
end results.
Improved productivity and collaboration of virtual organizations and respective computing
and data resources.
Allowing widely dispersed departments and business to create virtual organizations to share
data and resources.
15. What are the areas are difficult to implement in Grid Computing Infrastructure?
A Grid computing infrastructure component must address several potentially complicated
areas in many stages of the implementation. These areas are
Security
Resource management
Information services
Data management
16. Give the different layers of grid architecture.
Fabric Layer: Interface to local resources
Connectivity Layer: Manages Communications
Collective Layer: Coordinating Multiple Resources
Application Layer: User-Defined Application.

17.What do you mean by Grid Services?

Grid services are stateful Web services. The service itself maintains some state
information and it exposes a set of standard interfaces to enable interactions with its client.
18. Define Hype Cycle
This cycle shows the expectations for the technology at five different
stages. The expectations rise sharply from the trigger period to a high peak of inflated
expectations.Through a short period of disillusionment, the expectation may drop to a valley
and then increase steadily over a long enlightenment period to a plateau of productivity. The
number of years for an emerging technology to reach a certain stage is marked by special
symbols.
19. Difference between CPU and GPU ?
A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a special purpose processor, optimized or
calculations commonly (and repeatedly) required for Computer Graphics, particularly SIMD
operations.
A Central Processing Unit (CPU) is a general purpose processor - it can in principle do
any computation, but not necessarily in an optimal fashion for any given computation. One can
do graphics processing on a CPU - but it likely will not produce the result anywhere nearly as
fast as a properly programmed GPU.
20.what is meant by NAS and SAN ?
A storage area network (SAN) connects servers to network storage such as disk arrays.
Network attached storage (NAS) connects client hosts directly to the disk arrays.