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Is It -- Finally -- Time for the Grid?

By Jeff Merron

Grid computing would seem to be a simple concept: computers are linked together and the machines share resources such as CPU cycles, RAM and data storage capabilities. Free resources on one machine can be tapped by other users on the grid; in return, a machine in need of additional computing capacity can utilize free resources available on other parts of the grid.

"In some senses, the idea is a very old one," says Ian Foster, the director of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago's Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Ill., and considered by most in the field to be the "father of the grid." "When the Internet first appeared in the late 1960s, some people talked about how you might be able to create computing utilities. But it was with the emergence of high-speed networks in the early 1990s that people really started looking seriously at how you could link systems together."

Not surprisingly with such an amorphous concept, there's some confusion about a clear definition of the term "grid computing." Foster suggests that the best way to think about it is as a set of technologies that closely dovetail with other similar sets of technologies. "It's really a continuum from the tightly-coupled parallel machines, like IBM's Blue Gene, to clusters, and then collections of clusters and, in the sciences and some large companies, national-scale grids that link clusters and other systems at many sites." (article continues)

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