The Grid Computing Information Centre (GRID Infoware: http://www.gridcomputing.com) aims to contribute to the development and advancement of technologies that enable us to access computing power and resources with the ease similar to electrical power. The computational power grid is analogous to electric power grid. Grid computing allows to couple geographically distributed resources and offers consistent and inexpensive access to resources irrespective of their physical location or access point. It enables sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources (such as supercomputers, compute clusters, storage systems, data sources, instruments, people). Thus allowing them to be used a single, unified resource for solving large-scale compute and data intensive computing applicatinos (e.g, molecular modelling for drug design).
What is Grid ?
In June, I attended the Grid Computing Planet conference in San Jose, California and I was suprised to learn that people even call cluster as grid. I believe that it is a marketing hype. Here is my definition of the Grid, which is based on my presentation as part of the "Understanding the Grid" panel:
Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of resources distributed across "multiple" administrative domains based on their (resources) availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements.
If distributed resources happen to be managed by a single, global centralised scheduling system, then it is a cluster. In cluster, all nodes work cooperatively with common goal and objective as the resource allocation is performed by a centralised, global resource manager. In Grid, each node has its own resource manager and allocation policy. Some of these points are being highlighted in my panel presentation at P2P 2002 conference.
Note: "multiple" administrative domains can exist within a single organisation. For example, two clusters managed by their own resource managers within an university can form a grid.
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