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Grid Computing Coming Of Age

Posted by timothy on from the upside-of-supersizing dept.

ravenousbugblatter writes "The New York Times online has an article discussing grid computing and recent advances made by Dr. Ian Foster, among others. The article compares the state of grid computing over the internet to where the internet was in 1994, which was soon after the development of the software for the use of URL's, HTML, and HTTP. Predictions are made in the article that in the near future the massive power of grid computing will be available to anyone with an internet connection, not just to big companies that can afford to hire HP and Sun to run a grid project for them."

3 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Grid2003 by grennis · · Score: 5, Informative
    Why settle for just reading articles when you can attend the Grid2003 workshop in Phoenix this November?

    Its the 4th one, and getting better every year.

  2. Registration Free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article from NYTimes requires (free) registration.

    Here is the registration free URL

    Please use news.google.com for finding article links.

  3. Re:personally by groover+mctasty · · Score: 5, Informative
    I have spent some time reading "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure" by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, as well as the OGSA/OGSA standards being worked on by the Global Grid Frome . This is how I make the distinction.

    Distributed computing is a collection of ideas and practices of which Grid computing is a subset. Distributed computing involves any type of computational resource sharing over a range of couplings. Grid computing, basically, is the idea of taking the solutions distributed computing has come up with so far and making implementing them over widely distributed networks in a standard framework that will make sharing easy, flexible, and powerful. At the same time, faster computers, more available storage and higher bandwidth networks are pushing the development of new distributed technologies for applications suited to a standardized, available computational grid. These applications include physics simulations, tele-immersion (sort of a networked virtual reality), climate modeling, drug discovery, etc. Yeah these are all research applications. Just like the original Internet, the research community is a natural first audience. It will be interesting to see how companies and, eventually, consumers take advantage of the Grid in the future.