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Grid Computing: Conceptual Flyover For Developers
An anonymous reader writes "This article relates many Grid computing concepts to known quantities for developers, such as object-oriented programming, XML, and Web services. The author offers a reading list of white papers, articles, and books where you can find out more about Grid computing."
The linked article is written in May 2003 yet it's new now?
Hmm. It's not that hard, but I agree: the author seems to obfuscate a fairly simple to explain principle.
In a few words: grid computing is the use of many connected computers for one task.
Or, you might want to think about it as multithreading, but spread out over multiple machines.
The author is making a case for a standardization of how this should be handled.
Please login to access my lawn
The grid discussed here seems only to be built on the OGSA and Globus Toolkit, and Globus has not really covered itself in glory with their poor UIs etc.
Grid seems to address occasional demand for "much more power" from your computing resource, but does not really provide a consistent flexible computing resource.
The academic world uses External Grids to pool resources but private Enterprise has little to gain from these External Grids in exchange for a HUGE security problem.
And Internal Grids? These are so immature as to beggar belief. Why risk investing in these configurations when bang per buck is so uninviting.
In a way it's a matter of taste, but I'd define it this way: "parallel" -> many CPU's, but quite close in 1 place, like in a SMP desktop. "distributed" -> with network in between, as in Beowulf cluster (possibly over the internet).
What would make "distributed" a Grid? The fact that it's 'everywhere', always working/available somewhere, like P2P networks. You can take your equipment off the network, but the network (ehh, grid) goes happily on doing its thing.
This becomes really useful when it's a easy to use and commonplace as the internet today. Send out some software, it grabs a piece of data here, grabs a program there, finds a server to do the computation, and reports back to you with the result. Got some cycles to spare? Put some in the Grid, earn money. Just wait and see, some day computing power will be supplied and consumed the way electric power is today.