Bringing the Grid home

While grid computing promises unparalleled secure sharing of computation and resources in a heterogeneous environment, it has not yet found wide-spread adoption. Without a large user base, the promises of grid computing can not be fulfilled. One reason grid computing has lacked wide adoption because users are unwilling to suffer the cost of learning new paradigms or to modify applications to use grid resources. We address this issue by layering the simple and familiar paradigm of a filesystem atop of a grid-backend with G-ICING. G-ICING is a Windows installable filesystem that interacts with a Grid-backend using standards developed by the open grid forum. We have created a prototype of G-ICING using Genesis II as our grid backend. In our evaluation, we demonstrate that it is both practical and easy-to-use. With G-ICING, we can finally bring the promises of grid computing home.