Using Clouds to Provide Grids Higher-levels of Abstrac- Tion and Explicit Support for Usage Modes

Status of This Document This document provides information to the grid community, relating recent developments in the area of Cloud computing, to the area and standardization landscpa in Grid computing. It is supposed to inform the OGF community. Distribution is unlimited. Abstract Grids in their current form of deployment and implementation have not been as successful as hoped in engendering distributed applications. Amongst other reasons, the level of detail that needs to be controlled for the successful development and deployment of applications remains too high. We argue that there is a need for higher levels of abstractions for current Grids. By introducing the relevant terminology, we try to understand Grids and Clouds as systems; we find this leads to a natural role for the concept of Affinity, and argue that this is a missing element in current Grids. Providing these affinities and higher-level abstractions is consistent with the common concepts of Clouds. Thus this paper establishes how Clouds can be viewed as a logical and next higher-level abstraction from Grids.