August 2011 Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (BScIT) Semester 5 BT9002 Grid Computing 4 Credits (Book ID: B1189)

89) Assignment Set 1 (60 Marks) Answer all questions 10 x 6 = 60 1. Define Grid computing. Ans: Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files. What distinguishes grid computing from conventional high performance computing systems such as cluster computing is that grids tend to be more loosely coupled, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed. Although a grid can be dedicated to a specialized application, it is more common that a single grid will be used for a variety of different purposes. Grids are often constructed with the aid of general-purpose grid software libraries known as middleware. Grid size can vary by a considerable amount. Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a super virtual computer is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform very large tasks. Furthermore, distributed or grid computing, in general, is a special type of parallel computing that relies on complete computers (with onboard CPUs, storage, power supplies, network interfaces, etc.) connected to a network (private, public or the Internet) by a conventional network interface, such as Ethernet. This is in contrast to the traditional notion of a supercomputer, which has many processors connected by a local high-speed computer bus. Grid computing combines computers from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal, to solve a single task, and may then disappear just as quickly. One of the main strategies of grid computing is to use middleware to divide and apportion pieces of a program among several computers, sometimes up to many thousands. Grid computing involves computation in a distributed fashion, which may also involve the aggregation of large-scale cluster computing-based systems. The size of a grid may vary from smallconfined to a network of computer workstations within a corporation, for exampleto large, public collaborations across many companies and networks. "The notion of a confined grid may also be known as an intra-nodes cooperation whilst the notion of a larger, wider grid may thus refer to an inter-nodes cooperation". Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a super virtual computer is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform very large tasks. This technology has been applied to computationally intensive scientific, mathematical, and academic problems through

volunteer computing, and it is used in commercial enterprises for such diverse applications as drug discovery, economic forecasting, seismic analysis, and back office data processing in support for ecommerce and Web services.

2. What is the definition for Grid concept given by Plaszczak/Wellner? Ans: Plaszczak/Wellner define grid technology as "the technology that enables resource virtualization, on-demand provisioning, and service (resource) sharing between organizations." Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files. What distinguishes grid computing from conventional high performance computing systems such as cluster computing is that grids tend to be more loosely coupled, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed. Although a grid can be dedicated to a specialized application, it is more common that a single grid will be used for a variety of different purposes. Grids are often constructed with the aid of general-purpose grid software libraries known as middleware. Grid size can vary by a considerable amount. Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a super virtual computer is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform very large tasks. Furthermore, distributed or grid computing, in general, is a special type of parallel computing that relies on complete computers (with onboard CPUs, storage, power supplies, network interfaces, etc.) connected to a network (private, public or the Internet) by a conventional network interface, such as Ethernet. This is in contrast to the traditional notion of a supercomputer, which has many processors connected by a local high-speed computer bus.

3. What are the core functional computational requirements for grid applications? Ans: Grids computing offer a way to solve Grand Challenge problems such as protein folding, financial modeling, earthquake simulation, and climate/weather modeling. Grids offer a way of using the information technology resources optimally inside an organization. They also provide a means for offering information technology as a utility for commercial and noncommercial clients, with those clients paying only for what they use, as with electricity or water. Grid computing is being applied by the National Science Foundation's National Technology Grid, NASA's Information Power Grid, Pratt & Whitney, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., and American Express. One cycle-scavenging networks is SETI@home, which was using more than 3 million computers to achieve 23.37 sustained teraflops (979 lifetime teraflops) as of September 2001. As of August 2009 Folding@home achieves more than 4 petaflops on over 350,000 machines. The European Union funded projects through the framework programmes of the European Commission. BEinGRID (Business Experiments in Grid) was a research project funded by the European Commission as an Integrated Project under the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) sponsorship program. Started on June 1, 2006, the project ran 42 months, until November 2009. The project was coordinated by Atos Origin. According to the project fact sheet, their mission is to establish effective routes to foster the adoption of grid computing across the EU and to stimulate research into innovative business models using Grid technologies. To extract best practice and common themes from the experimental implementations, two groups of consultants are analyzing a series of pilots, one technical, one business. The project is significant not only for its long duration, but also for its budget, which at 24.8 million Euros, is the largest of any FP6 integrated project. Of this, 15.7 million is provided by the European commission and the remainder by its 98 contributing partner companies. Since the end of the project, the results of BEinGRID have been taken up and carried forward by IT-Tude.com. The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, based in the European Union and included sites in Asia and the United States, was a follow-up project to the European DataGrid (EDG) and evoled into the European Grid Infrastructure. This, along with the LHC Computing Grid (LCG), was developed to support experiments using the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The A list of active sites participating within LCG can be found online as can real time monitoring of the EGEE infrastructure. The relevant software and documentation is also publicly accessible. There is speculation that dedicated fiber optic links, such as those installed by CERN to address the LCG's data-intensive needs, may one day be available to home users thereby providing internet services at speeds up to 10,000 times faster than a traditional broadband connection. The distributed.net project was started in 1997. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility (NAS) ran genetic algorithms using the Condor cycle scavenger running on about 350 Sun Microsystems and SGI workstations.

In 2001, United Devices operated the United Devices Cancer Research Project based on its Grid MP product, which cycle-scavenges on volunteer PCs connected to the Internet. The project ran on about 3.1 million machines before its close in 2007. As of 2011, over 6.2 million machines running the open-source Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform are members of the World Community Grid, which tops the processing power of the current fastest supercomputer system (China's Tianhe-I). Definitions Today there are many definitions of grid computing:

In his article What is the Grid? A Three Point Checklist, Ian Foster lists these primary attributes:
o o o

Computing resources are not administered centrally. Open standards are used. Nontrivial quality of service is achieved.

Plaszczak/Wellner define grid technology as "the technology that enables resource virtualization, on-demand provisioning, and service (resource) sharing between organizations." IBM defines grid computing as the ability, using a set of open standards and protocols, to gain access to applications and data, processing power, storage capacity and a vast array of other computing resources over the Internet. A grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of resources distributed across multiple administrative domains based on their (resources) availability, capacity, performance, cost and users' quality-of-service requirements.

An earlier example of the notion of computing as utility was in 1965 by MIT's Fernando Corbat. Corbat and the other designers of the Multics operating system envisioned a computer facility operating like a power company or water company.]

Buyya/Venugopal define grid as "a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed autonomous resources dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements".

CERN, one of the largest users of grid technology, talk of The Grid: a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the Internet.

Grids can be categorized with a three stage model of departmental grids, enterprise grids and global grids. These correspond to a firm initially utilising resources within a single group i.e. an engineering department connecting desktop machines, clusters and equipment. This progresses to enterprise grids where nontechnical staff's computing resources can be used for cycle-stealing and storage. A global grid

is a connection of enterprise and departmental grids that can be used in a commercial or collaborative manner.

4. What are the characteristics that users/applications in Grid Computing environments must be able to perform? Ans: The key distinction between clusters and grids is mainly lie in the way resources are managed. In case of clusters, the resource allocation is performed by a centralised resource manager and all nodes cooperatively work together as a single unified resource. In case of Grids, each node has its own resource manager and don't aim for providing a single system view. Some of these points are being highlighted in my panel presentation at P2P 2002 conference. It should be noted that autonomous resources in the Grid can span across a single or multiple organisations. You will also be able to find some of my thoughts on these issues in some of my media interviews. Please check out the following interviews:

Technology Research News: Grid Computing and its Economies Technology Research News: Grid Applications and Molecular Docking Enterprise Architect Magazine: Grid Computing Network World Magazine: Grid and Security Technology Research News: Gridscape and its applications

5. List and explain the three main issues that characterize computational grids. Ans: The boundaries of the computational spatial grid in SWAN are either land or water. In the case of land there is no problem: the land does not generate waves and in SWAN it absorbs all incoming wave energy. But in the case of a water boundary there may be a problem. Often no wave conditions are known along such a boundary and SWAN then assumes that no waves enter the area and that waves can leave the area freely. These assumptions obviously contain errors which propagate into the model. These boundaries must therefore be chosen sufficiently far away from the area where reliable computations are needed so that they do not affect the computational results there. This is best established by varying the location of these boundaries and inspect the effect on the results. Sometimes the waves at these boundaries can be estimated with a certain degree of reliability. This is the case if (a) results of another model run are available (nested computations) or, (b) observations are available. If model results are available along the boundaries of the computational spatial grid, they are usually from a coarser resolution than the computational spatial grid under consideration. This implies that this coarseness of the boundary propagates into the computational grid. The problem is therefore essentially the same as if no waves are assumed along the boundary except that now the error may be more acceptable (or the boundaries are permitted to be closer to the area of interest). If observations are available, they can be used as input at the boundaries. However, this usually covers only part of the boundaries so that the rest of the boundaries suffer from the same error as above. A special case occurs near the coast. Here it is often possible to identify an up-wave boundary (with proper wave information) and two lateral boundaries (with no or partial wave information). The affected areas with errors are typically regions with the apex at the corners of the water boundary with wave information, spreading towards shore at an angle of 30 o to 45 o for wind sea conditions to either side of the imposed mean wave direction (less for swell conditions; the angle is essentially the one-sided width of the directional distribution of wave energy). For propagation of short crested waves (wind sea condtions) an example is given in Figure 2.1. For this reason the lateral boundaries should be sufficiently far away from the area of interest to avoid the propagation of this error into this area. Such problems do not occur if the lateral boundaries contain proper wave information over their entire length e.g. obtained from a previous SWAN computation or if the lateral boundaries are coast.

Figure 2.1: Disturbed regions in the computational grid due to erroneous boundary conditions are indicated with shaded areas. When output is requested along a boundary of the computational grid, it may occur that this output differs from the boundary conditions that are imposed by the user. The reason is that SWAN accepts only the user-imposed incoming wave components and that it replaces the user-imposed outgoing wave components with computed outgoing components (propagating to the boundary from the interior region). The user is informed by means of a warning in the output when the computed significant wave height differs more than 10%, say (10% is default), from the user-imposed significant wave height (command BOUND...). The actual value of this difference can be set by the user (see the SET command). Note that this warning will not apply in the case of unstructured grids. If the computational grid extends outside the input grid, the reader is referred to Section 2.6.2 to find the assumptions of SWAN on depth, current, water level, wind, bottom friction in the non-overlapping area. The spatial resolution of the computational grid should be sufficient to resolve relevant details of the wave field. Usually a good choice is to take the resolution of the computational grid approximately equal to that of the bottom or current grid. If necessary, an unstructured grid may be used. SWAN may not use the entire user-provided computational grid if the user defines exception values on the depth grid (see command INPGRID BOTTOM) or on the curvi-linear computational grid (see command CGRID). It must be noted that for parallel runs using MPI the user must indicate an exception value when reading the bottom levels (by means of command INPGRID BOTTOM EXCEPTION), in order to obtain good load balancing. A computational grid point is either

wet, i.e. the grid point is included in the computations since it represents water; this may vary with time-dependent or wave-induced water levels or dry, i.e. the grid point is excluded from the computations since it represents land which may vary with time-dependent or wave-induced water levels or exceptional, i.e. the grid point is permanently excluded from the computations since it is so defined by the user.

If exceptional grid points occur in the computational grid, then SWAN filters the entire computational grid as follows:

each grid line between two adjacent wet computational grid points (a wet link) without an adjacent, parallel wet link, is removed, each wet computational grid point that is linked to only one other wet computational grid point, is removed and each wet computational grid point that has no wet links is removed.

The effect of this filter is that if exception values are used for the depth grid or the curvi-linear computational grid, one-dimensional water features are ignored in the SWAN computations (results at these locations with a width of about one grid step may be unrealistic). If no exception values are used, the above described filter will not be applied. As a consequence, one-dimensional features may appear or disappear due to changing water levels (flooding may create them, drying may reduce two-dimensional features to one-dimensional features). The computational time window must be defined by the user in case of nonstationary runs. The computational window in time must start at a time that is early enough that the initial state of SWAN has propagated through the computational area before reliable output of SWAN is expected. Before this time the output may not be reliable since usually the initial state is not known and only either no waves or some very young sea state is assumed for the initial state. This is very often erroneous and this erroneous initial state is propagated into the computational area. The computational time step must be given by the user in case of nonstationary runs. Since, SWAN is based on implicit numerical schemes, it is not limited by the Courant stability criterion (which couples time and space steps). In this sense, the time step in SWAN is not restricted. However, the accuracy of the results of SWAN are obviously affected by the time step. Generally, the time step in SWAN should be small enough to resolve the time variations of computed wave field itself. Usually, it is enough to consider the time variations of the driving fields (wind, currents, water depth, wave boundary conditions). But be careful: relatively(!) small time variations in depth (e.g. by tide) can result in relatively(!) large variations in the wave field.

As default, the first guess conditions of a stationary run of SWAN are determined with the 2

nd

generation mode of SWAN. The initial condition of a nonstationary run of SWAN is by default a JONSWAP spectrum with a cos2( ) directional distribution centred around the local wind direction. A quasi-stationary approach can be employed with stationary SWAN computations in a time-varying sequence of stationary conditions. The computational spectral grid needs to be provided by the user. In frequency space, it is simply defined by a minimum and a maximum frequency and the frequency resolution which is proportional to the frequency itself (i.e. logarithmic, e.g., follows (see command CGRID):

f = 0.1 f). The frequency domain may be specified as

The lowest frequency, the highest frequency and the number of frequencies can be chosen. Only the lowest frequency and the number of frequencies can be chosen. The highest frequency will be computed by SWAN such that f = 0.1 f. This resolution is required by the DIA method for the approximation of nonlinear 4-wave interactions (the so-called quadruplets).

Only the highest frequency and the number of frequencies can be chosen. The lowest frequency will be computed by SWAN such that f = 0.1 f. This resolution is required by the DIA method for the approximation of nonlinear 4-wave interactions.

Only the lowest frequency and the highest frequency can be chosen. The number of frequencies will be computed by SWAN such that f = 0.1 f. This resolution is required by the DIA method for the approximation of nonlinear 4-wave interactions.

The value of lowest frequency must be somewhat smaller than 0.7 times the value of the lowest peak frequency expected. The value of highest frequency must be at least 2.5 to 3 times the highest peak frequency expected. For the XNL approach, however, this should be 6 times the highest peak frequency. Usually, it is chosen less than or equal to 1 Hz.

SWAN has the option to make computations that can be nested in WAM or WAVEWATCH III. In such runs SWAN interpolates the spectral grid of WAM or WAVEWATCH III to the (user provided) spectral grid of SWAN. The WAM Cycle 4 source term in SWAN has been retuned for a highest prognostic frequency (that is explicitly computed by SWAN) of 1 Hz. It is therefore recommended that for cases where wind generation is important and WAM Cycle 4 formulations are chosen, the highest prognostic frequency is about 1 Hz. In directional space, the directional range is the full 360 o unless the user specifies a limited directional range. This may be convenient (less computer time and/or memory space), for example, when waves travel towards a coast within a limited sector of 180 o. The directional resolution is determined by the

number of discrete directions that is provided by the user. For wind seas with a directional spreading of typically 30 o on either side of the mean wave direction, a resolution of 10 o seems enough whereas for swell with a directional spreading of less than 10 o, a resolution of 2 o or less may be required. If the user is confident that no energy will occur outside a certain directional sector (or is willing to ignore this amount of energy), then the computations by SWAN can be limited to the directional sector that does contain energy. This may often be the case of waves propagating to shore within a sector of 180 o around some mean wave direction. It is recommended to use the following discretization in SWAN for applications in coastal areas: direction resolution for wind sea direction resolution for swell frequency range spatial resolution 0.04 x, = 15o -10o = 5o -2o f 1.00 Hz

y = 50 - 1000 m

The numerical schemes in the SWAN model require a minimum number of discrete grid points in each spatial directions of 2. The minimum number of directional bins is 3 per directional quadrant and the minimum number of frequencies should be 4.

6. What are the components that are necessary to form a grid?

Ans: In this section, we describe at a high level the primary components of a grid environment. Depending on the grid design and its expected use, some of these components may or may not be required, and in some cases they may be combined to form a hybrid component. However, understanding the roles of the components as we describe them here will help you understand the considerations when developing grid-enabled applications. Portal/user interface Just as a consumer sees the power grid as a receptacle in the wall, a grid user should not see all of the complexities of the computing grid. Although the user interface can come in many forms and be application-specific, for the purposes of our discussion, let's think of it as a portal. Most users today understand the concept of a Web portal, where their browser provides a single interface to access a wide variety of information sources. A grid portal provides the interface for a user to launch applications that will use the resources and services provided by the grid. From this perspective, the user sees the grid as a virtual computing resource just as the consumer of power sees the receptacle as an interface to a virtual generator. Figure 1. Possible user view of a grid

The current Globus Toolkit does not provide any services or tools to generate a portal, but this can be accomplished with tools such as WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Application Server. Security A major requirement for Grid computing is security. At the base of any grid environment, there must be mechanisms to provide security, including authentication, authorization, data encryption, and so on. The Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) component of the Globus Toolkit provides robust security mechanisms. The GSI includes an OpenSSL implementation. It also provides a single sign-on mechanism, so that once a user is authenticated, a proxy certificate is created and used when performing actions within the grid. When designing your grid environment, you may use the GSI sign-in to grant

access to the portal, or you may have your own security for the portal. The portal will then be responsible for signing in to the grid, either using the user's credentials or using a generic set of credentials for all authorized users of the portal. Figure 2. Security in a grid environment

Broker Once authenticated, the user will be launching an application. Based on the application, and possibly on other parameters provided by the user, the next step is to identify the available and appropriate resources to use within the grid. This task could be carried out by a broker function. Although there is no broker implementation provided by Globus, there is an LDAP-based information service. This service is called the Grid Information Service (GIS), or more commonly the Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS). This service provides information about the available resources within the grid and their status. A broker service could be developed that utilizes MDS. Figure 3. Broker service

Scheduler Once the resources have been identified, the next logical step is to schedule the individual jobs to run on them. If a set of stand-alone jobs are to be executed with no interdependencies, then a specialized scheduler may not be required. However, if you want to reserve a specific resource or ensure that different jobs within the application run concurrently (for instance, if they require inter-process communication), then a job scheduler should be used to coordinate the execution of the jobs. The Globus Toolkit does not include such a scheduler, but there are several schedulers available that have been tested with and can be used in a Globus grid environment. It should also be noted that there could be different levels of schedulers within a grid environment. For instance, a cluster could be represented as a single resource. The cluster may have its own scheduler to help manage the nodes it contains. A higher level scheduler (sometimes called a meta scheduler) might be used to schedule work to be done on a cluster, while the cluster's scheduler would handle the actual scheduling of work on the cluster's individual nodes. Figure 4. Scheduler

Data management If any data -- including application modules -- must be moved or made accessible to the nodes where an application's jobs will execute, then there needs to be a secure and reliable method for moving files and data to various nodes within the grid. The Globus Toolkit contains a data management component that provides such services. This component, know as Grid Access to Secondary Storage (GASS), includes facilities such as GridFTP. GridFTP is built on top of the standard FTP protocol, but adds additional functions and utilizes the GSI for user authentication and authorization. Therefore, once a user has an authenticated proxy certificate, he can use the GridFTP facility to move files without having to go through a login process to every node involved. This facility provides third-party file transfer so that one node can initiate a file transfer between two other nodes. Figure 5. Data management

Job and resource management With all the other facilities we have just discussed in place, we now get to the core set of services that help perform actual work in a grid environment. The Grid Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM) provides the services to actually launch a job on a particular resource, check its status, and retrieve its results when it is complete. Figure 6. GRAM

Other facilities There are other facilities that may need to be included in your grid environment and considered when designing and implementing your application. For instance, inter-process communication and accounting/chargeback services are two common facilities that are often required.

7. What are the areas that a Grid Computing infrastructure component must address in many stages of the implementation? Ans: Grid computing is a powerful IT model that helps you improve collaboration within and outside your organization. When done correctly, a grid implementation enables you to virtualize your resources and share them as services across your enterprise. Using a range of products, services, and industrystandard building blocks, we help you build a grid that solves your business problems. Designing and implementing a grid Building a grid that meets your specific business problems requires experience and expertise. Our service professionals help you design, architect, implement, and run a grid implementation based on open-source solutions and products. Key services include: Grid Consulting Services Utility Computing Services Choosing the right grid-enabling technologies

Advance clustering, virtualization, utility computing, high-performance computing, Web services, security, and enterprise management are essential to effective grid computing. We have made significant investments in these areas, including working to grid-enable our products that connect to the network. We are developing grid-enhancing management software for all our platforms, which improves your ability to manage your entire grid environment. Key technologies and products include: Virtualization Cloud computing HP BladeSystem servers Service-oriented architecture (SOA) transformation software Cluster Management High performance computing

8. What is grid problem? Briefly explain. Ans: To gain a clear understanding of the issues, it will once again be helpful to consider discrete problems. The discussion here is a continuation of Section .In that section, the state represented a

position,

, and a direction,

. Now suppose that the state is represented as

, in which

represents the particular environment that contains the robot. This will require defining a space of environments, which is rarely represented explicitly. It is often expressed as a constraint on the types of environments that can exist. For example, the set of environments could be defined as all connected 2D grid-planning problems. The set of simply connected grid-planning problems is even further constrained. One question immediately arises: When are two maps of an environment equivalent? Recall the maps shown in Figures 12.2a and 12.3b. The map in Figure 12.3b appears the same for every 90-degree rotation; however, the map in Figure 12.2a appears to be different. Even if it appears different, it should still be the same environment, right? Imagine mapping a remote island without having a compass that indicates the direction to the north pole. An orientation (which way is up?) for the map can be chosen arbitrarily without any harm. If a map of the environment is made by ``drawing'' on , it should seem

that two maps are equivalent if a transformation in to overlay one perfectly on top of the other.

(i.e., translation and rotation) can be applied

When defining an environment space, it is important to clearly define what it means for two environments to be equivalent. For example, if we are required to build a map by exploration, is it required to also provide the exact translation and orientation? This may or may not be required, but it is important to specify this in the problem description. Thus, we will allow any possibility: If the maps

only differ by a transformation in the application.

, they may or may not be defined as equivalent, depending on

To consider some examples, it will be convenient to define some finite or infinite sets of environments. Suppose that planning on a 2D grid is once again considered. In this section, assume that each grid point

has integer coordinates

, as defined in Section 2.1. Let

denote a set of denote this set.

environments. Once again, there are four possible directions for the robot to face; let The state space is

Assume in general that an environment,

, is specified by indicating a subset of

that

corresponds to the positions of all of the white tiles on which the robot can be placed. All other tiles are black, which means that they are obstacles. If any subset of is allowed, then

. This includes many useless maps, such as a checkerboard that spans the entire plane; this motivates some restrictions on . For example, can be restricted to be the subset of

that corresponds to all maps that include a white tile at the origin, all other white tiles are reachable from it and lie within a bounded region.

, and for which

Examples will be given shortly, but first think about the kinds of problems that can be formulated: 1. Map building: The task is to visit every reachable tile and construct a map. Depending on how is defined, this may identify a particular environment in or a set of environments that are

consistent with the exploration. This may also be referred to as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM, because constructing a complete map usually implies that the robot position and orientation are eventually known [483,970]. Thus, the complete state, , as given in

is determined by the map-building process. For the grid problem considered here, this point is trivial, but the problem becomes more difficult for the case of probabilistic uncertainty in a continuous environment. 2. Determining the environment: Imagine that a robot is placed into a building at random and then is switched on. The robot is told that it is in one of a fixed (i.e., 10) number of buildings. It must move to determine which one. As the number of possible environments is increased, the problem appears to be more like map building. In fact, map building can be considered as a special case in which little or no constraints are initially imposed on the set of possible environments. 3. Navigation: In this case, a goal position is to be reached, even though the robot has no map. The location of the goal relative to the robot can be specified through a sensor. The robot is allowed to solve this problem without fully exploring the environment. Thus, the final nondeterministic Istate after solving the task could contain numerous possible environments. Only a part of the environment is needed to solve the problem. 4. Searching: In this case, a goal state can only be identified when it is reached (or detected by a short-range sensor). There are no additional sensors to help in the search. The environment must be systematically explored, but the search may terminate early if the goal is found. A map does not necessarily have to be constructed. Searching can be extended to pursuit-evasion, which is covered .

9. Explain the need for grid protocols. Ans: The XPort-MB Device Server uses TCP/IP protocols for network communication. The supported standards
are: ARP, UDP, TCP, ICMP, Telnet, TFTP, DHCP, and SNMP. For transparent connections, TCP/IP (binary stream) or Telnet protocols are used. Firmware upgrades can be made with the TFTP protocol. The industrial protocol defines addressing, routing and data block handling over the network. The TCP (transmission control protocol) assures that no data is lost or duplicated, and that everything sent into the connection on one side arrives at the target exactly as it was sent. For typical datagram applications where devices interact with others without maintaining a point-to-point connection, UDP datagram is used.

10. What are the characteristics of Services? Ans: characteristics of services which are;

Perishability Intangibility Variability Inseparably Non-ownership

Perishability Perhaps of all the suggested special characteristics of service products, this is one of the most difficult to appreciate. Why? Services are highly perishable compared to physical products. But how could, for example, the services of say, an airline be considered to be more perishable than, say, fresh food and vegetable products? The reason is that unlike most physical products, many services cannot be stored. For instance, if an airline does not sell all the seats on a particular flight, then those seats or rather the sales revenue of filling of them would have carried, has immediately and irreversibly gone. Intangibility Physical products in the store are widely displayed for customers to see, feel, touch, weigh or sniff at before deciding whether or not to buy. Comparing this with the choice of the service of say, an insurance policy. You cannot touch, see or smell the products before choosing, although clearly you can make some assessment based on past experience, word of mouth, or even the location and decor of the insurance office. The intangible nature of most services gives rise to special problems both for suppliers and consumers. Variability In the production and marketing of physical products, companies have increasingly paid special attention to ensuring consistency in quality, feature, packaging, and so on. More often than not all customers can be sure that every bottle of Coke he/she buys, even in a life-time of purchases, will not vary. The provision of services, however, invariably includes a large measure of the human element Indeed, with many services, we are purchasing nothing else but the skills of the suppliers. Because of this, it is often very difficult for both supplier and consumer to ensure a consistent product or quality of service. Inseparability A key distinguishing feature of service marketing is that the service provision and provider are inseparable from the service consumption and consumer. For example, we cannot take a hotel room home for consumption; we must consume this service at the point of provision. Similarly, the hairdresser needs to be physically present for this service to be consumed. This has implications both for channels of distribution and scale of operations. Non-ownership The final distinguishing feature of a service is that, unlike a physical product, the consumer does not secure ownership of the service. Rather the customer pays only to secure access to or use of the service. Again the hotel room is a good example. Similarly, with banking services, although the customer may be given a Cheque book, credit cards, etc, they serve only to allow the customer to make use of what he or she is actually buying, namely, bank services.