What kind of applications are best suited to grid computing?
Traditionally, distributed computing in general and grid computing in particular have been associated with computationally intensive scientific and numerical applications, but more recently there has been a growing interest in using grid technology for a wide range of large-scale commercial applications. The reason comes down to simple economics: you can build more powerful systems, more cheaply, by more efficient utilization of available computing resources. Now that the benefits and practicality of this technology are becoming pretty well established, companies are taking a closer look, but often unsure how it relates to their own business. In rethinking application designs, they are discovering that grid computing doesn’t just apply to number-crunching – it also makes perfect sense for all kinds of database-intensive applications, the bread and butter of commercial data processing. The question no longer is whether grid processing is relevant, but where to begin.
