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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."

5 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Does the average user care? by chenGOD · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sure this is great if you're doing simulations or animating/rendering stuff . But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal? How will this affect network security?

    1. Re:Does the average user care? by BWJones · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure this is great if you're doing simulations or animating/rendering stuff . But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal? How will this affect network security?

      Well, I guess the obvious answer is that this is Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Not News for Joe Schmoe.

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    2. Re:Does the average user care? by BWJones · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure this is great if you're doing simulations or animating/rendering stuff . But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal? How will this affect network security?

      Aside from my rather glib answer to the parent post, I should have added that for the average Joe Schmoe surfing the web, grid computing is very important for web-searches, hierarchical analysis of searches and valid links and if the spam load keeps increasing, we will have to have grids just to handle the load of email onslaught. Seriously though, all you have to do is examine any of the search engine companies. Take Google for instance. How do you think they do what they do? Grid computing is the answer.

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  2. Read between the hype.. by djmitche · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is great if you think it's great. Grid computing is a technology without a cause right now. It's preposterous to think that the average joe, or even the average joe company, will have any use for grid computing in the forseeable future. Most of us can't keep our load average above 0.1 (that's 10% for you Windows-users) doing anything useful as it is!

    Heck, look back over the grid computing stories we've seen here on /. Whose name keeps popping up?

    1. Re:Read between the hype.. by cranos · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Let me guess, you thought 640k was all anyone would need? Or maybe there would only be a market for 5 computers in the world.

      Grid Computing will find its reason, whether its sooner or later who knows, but dismissing it out of hand is short sighted to say the least.