BGSU grid: an experimental and educational grid environment

Grid computing enables massive scale computation with resources that are geographically dispersed over large area. With the advent of Grid Computing, computer resources of different administrative domains can be connected towards a common goal, such as performing high computing. In addition, it is useful for students, educators, and researchers to perform their experiments on the grid and use its tremendous computation potential to a great extent. One such effort regards creating a computational grid to benefit the users of the scientific and distributed computing community at BGSU. This paper presents the architectural details and the steps needed for the development of a working grid for educational purposes. It presents the actions needed to setup the infrastructure for the grid creation. It explains how to create virtual clusters, configure them, and add them to the grid. It also explains the steps needed to install the Globus toolkit which provides the communication channel between all the clusters in the grid. Finally, the paper provides suggestions to make this grid even more flexible and improved high computation tasks.