What is Grid?
Grid refers to an information technology infrastructure that enables the integrated, collaborative use of computers, networks, databases, and scientific instruments owned and managed by many different organizations in many different locations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing and often require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries.
In June’02, Dr. Buyya attended the Grid Computing Planet conference in San Jose, California and he was surprised to learn that people even call clusters as grids. He felt that it was a marketing hype. Here is his definition of the Grid, which is based on his 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 geographically distributed “autonomous” resources dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users’ quality-of-service requirements. It should be noted that Grids aim at exploiting synergies that result from cooperation–ablity to share and agreegrate distributed computational capabilities and deliver them as service.
