I would ammend your definition with the following requirement. In a grid, there is no single point of control over the the resources on the Grid. In other words, you use the resources, but have no control over their policies. This really is why a cluster is not a Grid and not every distributed computing environment is a Grid.
A highly desirable feature of an effective grid is interoperability. You want a common infrastructure that spans architectures. As much as i'd like people to always use IA based systems, for example, if a Grid is going to be sucessful, it must encompass Sun, IBM pSeries, and other architectures. --Tim -----Original Message----- From: Joe Greenseid [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 7:05 AM To: VINOD Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Oscar-users] Beowulf Vs Grid Computing Hi Vinod, Well, as my current job is in this "Grid Computing" field I guess I should hazard a guess. :) I think the best explanation of Grid computing I can come up with is the sharing of resources in a large, distributed environment. A lot of times, this may be across physical locations -- this part is the key -- basically, and simply, you could think of a grid as a cluster of clusters, with all of the "middleware" that is needed to cross networks, physical locations, different security and authentication methods, and so on. I personally would not consider a cluster to be able to exist with 2 sets of nodes, one in, say New York, and the other in California. Things like high speed interconnects and such are key for clusters these days -- speed is everything, and there's no grid software substitute for having 2 boxes being plugged into the same myrinet switch. :) Anyway, I hope this was somewhat helpful... --Joe --- Joe Greenseid [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://lcic.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~jgreen ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ Oscar-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oscar-users ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ Oscar-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oscar-users
