What is Grid Computing?
According to DEGREE (www.eu-degree.eu),
grid computing "provides the ability to perform higher throughput
computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a
virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process
execution across a parallel infrastructure."
Grids allow a computational power far exceeding what is
possible on one server.
Grid computing is a type of distributed computing.
In general, a distributed computing program is divided into
many parts to run on multiple servers connected via a network.
Grid computing coordinates the sharing of CPU, application,
data, storage and network resources.
Grid computing
is the pool of computers actively glued into a virtual computing
architecture by the other related components such as middleware
software, interconnects, networking devices, and storage units.
Oracle's implementation of grid architecture
is one of the most widely used commercial grid capable products.
The Open Grid
Forum
(OGF) is the current international standards body for grid computing.
OGF's members consist of 400 organizations in over 50
countries. OGF works to
increase the adoption of grid computing and create standards that
facilitate interoperability.
Where is the IT World on Grid Computing?
In many ways, grid computing is a solution without any problems to
solve. The pioneers of
grid computing are ready to solve the hardest problems that any
industry is willing to throw at them.
The task at hand is to find more problems that need to be
solved.
Main industries embracing grid computing:
What is Oracle's Direction?
Grid computing software is much more complex to create than typical
software. With each
release of Oracle RAC, true grid capabilities are evolving to be more
feature-rich. Database
market share is ultra-competitive.
As Oracle successfully tackles various grid computing
complexities and their competitors lag years and decades behind,
Oracle will logically charge ahead to make their grid computing
capabilities more feature-complete.
One challenge for Oracle and other grid software designers is
to make grid computing simpler to use and implement.
Oracle is one of the 400 organizational members of the Open Grid
Forum. At the time of
this writing, Toshihiro Suzuki is the Senior Director of Standards
Strategy and Architecture for Oracle Corporation Japan.
Toshihiro is part of the OGF Operational Leadership team.
He was chairperson of the OGF ancestor organization, the
Enterprise Grid
Alliance (EGA).
One reason why this newfound love for grid computing has evolved is
because of the appeal of power. The computational power that grid
computing offers makes the Intel and AMD CPU Gigahertz race somewhat
irrelevant. Instead of
waiting around for CPU power to be 1,000 times faster than it is
today, an engineer can simply take advantage of the massive
computational power that grid computing provides.
For academic researchers, grid computing offers low cost CPU power
that is much less expensive and freely available.
Today, Sun Microsystems offers "Sun Utility Computing."
After a simple pre-approval process, anyone can gain access to
thousands of CPUs at once.
If one has ever wondered what the highest prime number a grid
system can find in less than 5 minutes is, then Sun Utility Computing
is the chance to find out!
This quote from Sun Microsystems states, "For each job the user
submits and runs, the user's Sun Grid CPU usage is aggregated and then
rounded up to the nearest whole hour. For example, if your job used
1000 CPUs for one minute, it would be aggregated as 1000 CPU minutes
or 16.67 CPU hours. The software rounds this up to 17 hours and the
job would be billed as US $17."
