An attempt to integrate clouds in grids

Over the last decade, Grid computing has become an increasingly hot topic in the world of new technologies and European scientific research has benefited from the increasing availability of computing and data infrastructures with unprecedented capabilities put together in the framework of large scale projects and initiatives. However, during the last few years, interest has gradually shifted, especially in the world of enterprises, from Grid computing to an independent and complementary new computing paradigm: Cloud computing. Both Grid and Cloud computing provide access to a large compute or storage resource but Clouds massively exploit virtualization to provide uniform interface to the underlying resource thus hiding physical heterogeneity, geographical distribution and faults. Although Grid technology continues to dominate the public academic sector and scientific computing environments, new interests have raised in deploying cloud technology on Grid-enabled resources to improve the management and reliability of those resources via the virtualization layer. The aim of this paper is to present an attempt to integrate both technologies in a use case where the virtualization layer of the Cloud is "seen" by the Grid as a resource.