To many people, grid computing remains an alien concept. Perhaps the most widely known example of this technology is the SETI@home project, established in 1999 as a global grid-computing effort to detect extraterrestrial intelligence by analyzing small slices of radio telescope data.The SETI@home project harnesses the collective power of otherwise idle home computers, whose owners have downloaded a screen saver to give up a small amount of their system resources to help compute this data.
Today, grid computing — a term that refers to using the collective resources of many computers to perform large-scale calculations or analysis — has evolved from a tool used for intriguing scientific and educational purposes into a powerful way to deliver business benefits to commercial and government organizations.
As a whole, the potential of grid computing still is largely untapped by business and industry. But now that the technology has started to penetrate business networks — with big vendors like IBM, Oracle, Sun, and other major players pushing it — the case can be made for adopting a grid-computing architecture in the business environment.
Grid and Bear It
IBM, a key innovator in the development of grid computing, claims that most organizations have huge, unused computing capacity that is widely distributed within a heterogeneous I.T. environment. Typically, the productivity of an I.T. environment can be staggeringly low because mainframes are unused 40 percent of the time.
According to IBM, Unix servers are in operation less than 10 percent of the time, while most individual workstations actually produce work less than 5 percent of the time.
In a white paper for IBM, John Palfreyman, a director in IBM’s Global Services division, said grid computing can enable an organization to transform its distributed and difficult-to-manage computing systems into a large virtual computer.
These “gridded” PCs can work on problems and processes too complex for a single computer to handle efficiently, such as tasks that involve security, data processing, network bandwidth, or data storage.
“The systems linked in a grid might be in the same room or distributed across the globe. They might be running different operating systems on many hardware platforms, or they might even be owned by different organizations,” Palfreyman wrote.
Distinct Advantages
“The amount of computing resources put into place with a grid architecture can be enormous,” said Jonathan Eunice, principal I.T. adviser for Illuminata. (continued…)
| 1 | 2 | 3 | Next Page > |
