GRID4ALL

Grid4All aims to enable domestic users, non-profit organisations such as schools, and small enterprises, to share their resources and to access massive Grid resources when needed, envisioning a future in which access to resources is democratised, readily available, cooperative, and inexpensive. Grid4All goals entail a system pooling large amounts of cheap resources (connecting to commercial cluster providers when needed); a dynamic system satisfying spikes of demand; using self management techniques to scale and adapt to changes in environment; supporting isolated, secure, dynamic, geographically distributed user groups and using secure peer-to-peer techniques to federate large numbers of small-scale resources into large-scale Grids.

The technical issues addressed are aspects of security, support for multiple administrative and management authorities, self-management by combining the strong points of structured overlay P2P networks and that of component models, on-demand resource allocation, heterogeneity, and fault tolerance.

The proof of concept applications include: e-learning tools for collaborative editing in schools and a digital content processing service accessible by end residential users.