Grid Computing - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 241

12
Grid Comp uting
The grid computing paradigm based on resource sharing was brought to
broader public by the popular project (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu)
SETI@home. The goal of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
project is the detection of intelligent life outside earth. The project uses radio
telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. As such
signals are not known to occur naturally, it is expected that a detection of
them would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology. The analysis of
radio telescope signals involves huge amounts of data and is very comput-
ing intensive. No single research lab could provide the computing power
needed for it. Given the tremendous number of household PCs, the involved
scientists came up with the idea to invite owners of PCs to participate in
the research by providing the computing power of their computers when
they are idle. Users download a small program on their desktop. When the
desktop is idle, the downloaded program would detect it and use the idle
machine cycles. When the PC is connected back to the Internet, it would send
the results back to the central site. The SETI initiative recently celebrated the
10th anniversary (it was launched on May 17, 1999) and has at present more
than 3 million users that participate with their PCs.
12.1 Background to Grid Computing
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 or her without necessity to
care where the data he or she requires reside or which computer is process-
ing his or her request. 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 virtual-
ization and support for sharing of resources, scattered computing resources
are abstracted from the physical location and their specific features and pro-
vided to the users as a single resource that is automatically allocated to their
computing needs and processes. Almost every organization has significant
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