This new field of Grid Computing is a major research and development effort of computer science faculty jointly with CCT. This type of computing is basically focuses on sharing large research computers and instruments, experimental data, numerical simulations, analysis tools, research and development, as well as people, are closely coordinated and integrated in "virtual organizations" http://www.cct.lsu.edu/projects/gridlab/

• Dr. Gabrielle Allen
• Dr. Gerald Baumgartner

The Organic Grid: Self-Organizing Computation on a Peer-to-Peer Network: Professor Baumgartner and others propose a new design for desktop grids that relies on a self-organizing, fully decentralized approach to the organization of the computation. Our approach, called the Organic Grid, is a radical departure from current approaches and is modeledafter the way complex biological systems organize themselves. Similarly to current desktop grids, a large computational task is broken down into sufficiently small subtasks. Each subtask is encapsulated into a mobile agent, which is then released on the grid and discovers computational resources using autonomous behavior. In the process of "colonization" of available resources, the judicious design of the agent behavior produces the emergence of crucial properties of the computation that can be tailored to specific classes of applications. This project id jointly with the other faculty at Ohio State University

Faculty is involved in the following areas of research: distributed systems, grid and collaborative computing; data intensive distributed computing, resource allocation and management, fault tolerance, coordination of computation and I/O in distributed systems, design and analysis of distributed algorithms for various applications.

• Dr. Gabrielle Allen
• Dr. Konstantin Busch
• Dr. Sukhamay Kundu
• Dr. Seung-Jong Park