Latin American Perspectives on Grid Computing, from Bahia Blanca, Argentina

A computational grid is a distributed infrastructure that appears to the end user as one large computing resource across organization boundaries. Grid technologies enable large-scale sharing of resources within formal or informal consortia of individuals and/or institutions, usually called virtual organizations. In these settings, the discovery, characterization, and monitoring of resources, services, and computations can be challenging due to the considerable diversity, large numbers, dynamic behavior, and geographical distribution of the entities in which a user might be interested. This work explores the grid computing current state and perspectives in Latin America. In particular, we describe potential grid application areas and the experiences of our group in this promising field of research. Also, considering that grid trends are showing the importance of grid services we also identify some limitations and future research directions on this domain.