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Thursday, April 5, 2007
Anindya Roy and Anadi Misra
Computation has changed drastically since the days of the first computer. In the 60s and 70s, mainframes took charge of all processing and computation for government, scientific and organizational needs. Thereafter, we saw the advent of desktops or 'Micro Computers.' Almost parallelly, the concepts of networking started to develop. And it didn't take long thereafter when grids and clusters were implemented. In this article, we look into the concept of the computation extremes achieved taking clusters a step further. Yes, we are talking about the still in infancy yet very promising Computation Grid. Read on to find out what it is, how it works, and most importantly which way it is heading.
What is a Grid?
Its name and concept is derived from the electric power grid. To put it shortly a grid is the way to share computational power and data storage over the Internet. Just like the electric grid you don't have to worry where are you receiving power from. Basically, the computational grid brings all the resources under it into one entity. This collection of resources can then be used for high end computation and with the storage of the participating systems combined, provide an infinite but cheap storage option. While some might define it as a 'collection of clusters' or other definitions, we would like to stick to the definition we gave a little while ago without giving any specific structural example.
Now let us get down to a more elaborate definition. Grid computing can best be defined as a form of distributed computing that works by sharing computing, application, data, storage, or network resources across dynamic and geographically dispersed organizations or computers. This is the reason we say that a collection of clusters is not an appropriate definition. Clusters don't work by bringing together systems or computers located geographically apart. We will get down to differences between grids and clusters in detail a little later.
Grid technologies promise to change the way organizations tackle complex computational problems. However, the vision of large scale resource sharing is not yet a reality in many areas-grid computing is an evolving area of computing, where standards and technology are still being developed to enable this new technology.
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