August 24, 2006
A Grid Is a Grid Is a Grid...
Proven fact: If you hang around long enough, you can witness the world change around you. Take "grid computers," for instance.
It hasn't been that long ago that a "Grid computer" was a high-end ($8000-$10,000) laptop, best known for its semi-ruggadized matt-black magnesium case. Okay, maybe it was that long ago, the early 1980s. Still, you could make a credible argument that the Grid was, in fact, the first laptop computer. Moreover, in the spirit of what-goes-around-comes-around, it had features that we're seeing again today. For instance, the Grid didn't have a disk drive, but used 384 KB non-volatile bubble memory. Software could be loaded from a server and external floppy or hard disks. It also had a built-in modem, ran off of built-in batteries, and didn't need a cooling fan. But in the spirit of no-laptop-before-its-time, Grid Systems (the company that manufactured the Grid computer) wasn't able to make a go of it, eventually being acquired by (get this) Radio Shack.
These days, of course, a "grid computer" means something altogether different. Grid computing is a computing model that's based on multiple networked computers that model a virtual computer architecture that distributes execution across a parallel infrastructure. For obvious reasons, grid computing borrowed its moniker from electrical power grids back in the early 1990s.
It is probably no surprise that Dr. Dobb's has covered grid computing for a number of years, with articles such as:
Still, grid computing has generally been relegated to the research arena, although that's starting to rapidly change. Oracle has its Oracle RAC, the grid-enabled version of Oracle, and IBM has an array of IBM Grid Computing solutions. In short, there are real business reasons to adopt grids, particularly for large organizations.
But it is the smaller companies that are starting to make grid computing really interesting. ActiveGrid, for instance, is mixing up grids with Web 2.0, producing tools that let you accelerate Web 2.0 development. (Hear what ActiveGrid's Peter Yared has to say about this in his "Lightweight Architectures Meet the Enterprise" podcast.)
Likewise, Digipede Technologies is providing grid computing solutions on the Microsoft .NET platform. (Digipede's Robert Anderson and Dan Ciruli examine how SOA can scale using distributed computing technologies in the November 2006 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.)
Finally, a new version of the freely available Access Grid Toolkit, developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Lab, has just been released. The Access Grid Toolkit is software that uses audio, video, data and text to enable distributed researchers to work together as if they were at the same location.
Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:29 AM Permalink
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