For those of you that don't know me, I'm currently Chief Technologist for Sun's “New Economy” properties that include our website, developer/collaboration sites, the Sun Store, Sun Reman, Sun Grid, and our financing business.

One of my primary focusses, to date has been driving our Sun Grid program. And let me start by saying that the term “Grid” is as overloaded as the setDate() function around y2k... it means so many different things to different people.

Being an old Inmos Transputer guy, working in OCCAM building MPP systems for ASW work in the 80's, we built real “deterministic” processing grids then (the grids were largely an artifact of the fact that the processors of the day were so slow that we couldn't process the volume of data in real time). Now what we really have are computing farms which are tremendously performant, which differentially map compute, networking and storage resources, as dynamically bound entities(abstract or concrete), to provide optimal execution structures for business processes, and parallelized and/or serialized algorithms.

So let me take a quick moment to elaborate my definition of Grid and Utility that I will use moving forward:

Utility - largely a business/financial model based upon the notion of just in time shared demand/load aggregation model that allows a providing entity to deliver more compelling economics based upon multi-tenancy (dynamic capacity stacking) to allow more efficient use of capital assets. Specifically, a utility is marked by:

• Technologically complex but simple at point of use: plug & play
• Standard: you know what to expect
• Reliable: always available,
• Scalable: use as much as you want when you want
• Multi-Tenant: enabling demand aggregation for economic benefit
• Metered: transparent units of measured usage

Grid, on the other hand really represents the technical approach which allows for the pooling of resources in logical groups to enable the just in time connection of right-nodes in a way that composes systems based upon the systemic needs of an application (often marked by virtualization and abstraction of resources and then dynamic mapping, based upon a declarative model of the needs of software against the capabilities of a composed platform (attribution: Dennis Reedy, one of the founders of Project Rio).

I really like this definition of Grid:
“Resource sharing and coordinated problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations” (Ian Foster)

In effect, Scott McNealy's Big Friggin Webtone Switch

Gotta like this picture of the BFWTS

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