Clusters Vs Grids

[Greg Lindahl]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 06:40:08AM -0500, Gerry Creager N5JXS wrote:

> I'd offer that we're going to see grids grow for at least the forseeable 
> (?sp?; ?coffee?) future.  I think we need to coin another term, however, 
> for the applications that will run on them in the near term: 
> "pathetically" parallel.

The people who have been doing {distributed computing, metacomputing,
p2p, grids, insert new trendy term here} for a long time have built
systems which can run moderately data-intensive programs, not just
SETI at home. In fact, a realistic assessment of the bandwidth needed for
non-pathetic programs was the basis of the TeraGrid project.

> But what does the future hold?  I can foresee an application that uses 
> distributed storage to preposition an entire input dataset so that all 
> the distributed nodes can access it,

Or, you could use existing systems that do exactly that, which were
foreseen more than a decade ago, had multiple implementations 5 years
ago, and are heading towards production use today.

> Overall, I tend to agree with Mark's rather cynical assessment that
> it's a WorldCom marketting ploy that acquired a life of its own.

Which doesn't match up with the age of current grid efforts, which
predate WorldCom buying UUNet.

-- greg


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