Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1 Introduction: Business and Technological Drivers
of Grid Computing
Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva, Thomas Wozniak
1.1 Introduction
The Grid is an emerging infrastructure that will fundamentally change
the way we think - and use - computing. The word Grid is used by
analogy with the electric power grid, which provides pervasive access
to electricity and, like the computer and a small number of other
advances has had a dramatic impact on human capabilities and society.
Many believe that by allowing all components of our information
technology infrastructure - computational capabilities, databases,
sensors, and people - to be shared flexibly as true collaborative tools,
the Grid will have a similar transforming effect, allowing new classes of
application to emerge.
(Foster and Kesselman 2004)
The vision of using and sharing computers and data as utility has been inspired by
constantly increasing computing needs faced by researchers in science and can be
traced back in the 1960s to the Internet pioneer Licklider (see Berman and Hey
2004). Licklider wrote in his groundbreaking paper (Licklider 1960)
1
that computers
should be developed
“to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex
situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs.”
But, it was only in the mid 1990s when this vision became reality and the term “Grid
Computing” was coined in order to denote a new computing paradigm (Foster et al.
2001).
Explained from the user perspective in the most simplest way, Grid Computing
means that computing power and resources can be obtained as utility similar to
electricity - the user can simply request information and computations and have
them delivered to him without necessity to care where the data he requires resides
or which computer is processing his request (Goyal and Lawande 2005). From
the technical perspective Grid Computing means the virtualization and sharing
of available computing and data resources among different organizational and
physical domains. By means of virtualization and support for sharing of resources,
scattered computing resources are abstracted from the physical location and their
specific features and provided to the users as a single resource that is automatically
