This paper addresses the problem why grid technology has not spread as fast as the Web technology of the 1990’s. In the past
10 years, considerable efforts have been put into grid computing. Much progress has been made and more importantly, fundamental
challenges and essential issues of this field are emerging. This paper focuses on the area of grid system software research,
and argues that usability of grid system software must be enhanced. It identifies four usability issues, drawing from international
grid research experiences. It also presents advances by the Vega Grid team in addressing these challenges.
Keywords grid computing - system software - usability - distributed system architecture
Regular Paper: This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60573102, 90412010)
and the National Grand Fundamental Research 973 Program of China (Grant Nos. 2003CB317000, 2005CB321800).
Zhi-Wei Xu received his Ph.D. degree from University of Southern California in 1987. He is a professor and deputy director at Institute
of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research areas include distributed computing, high-performance computing
architecture and net-centric operating system, He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Grid Computing, Journal of
Parallel and Distributed Computing, and IEEE Trans. Computers.
Hao-Jie Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate at Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests include grid
file management and grid security.
Guo-Jie Li received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University in 1985. He is a professor and director of Institute of Computing Technology,
CAS. His research areas include CPU micro-architecture, social computing, grid computing, and high-performance computing architecture.
He serves as President of China Computer Federation and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Computer Science and Technology.