Predominantly used in scientific contexts, Grid Computing imposes constraints related to the underlying infrastructure, forcing in many cases users to rethink or rewrite their applications. Inspired by Amazonpsilas EC2 model, this paper presents a virtualization based system (GliteVM) that allows users to address this issue allowing them to execute any existing application in a gLite based Grid infrastructure without changing their current work setting and with a limited effort. The proposed solution can also have a wide and deep impact on the enterprise world, playing an important role in a variety of areas (from innovations to e-commerce, from social networks to research) where requirements of scalability, high-availability and security are expected.

Starting from 1990s and until now, Grid computing has been mainly used in scientific laboratories. Only in the last few years, it is evolving into a business-innovating technology that is driving commercial adoption. In this paper, we describe GridVideo, a Grid-based multimedia application for the distributed tailoring and streaming of media files. The objective is to show, starting from a real experience, how Grid technologies can be used for the development of nonscientific applications. Relevant performance aspects are analyzed, regarding both user-oriented (in terms of responsiveness) and provider-oriented (in terms of system efficiency) requirements. Different multimedia data dissemination strategies have been analyzed and an innovative technique, based on the Fibonacci series, is proposed. To respond to the stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, typical of soft real-time applications, a reservation-based architecture is presented. Such architecture is able to manage the Grid resource allocation, thus enabling the provisioning of advanced services with different QoS levels. Technical and practical problems encountered during the development are discussed, and a thorough performance evaluation of the developed prototype is presented.