Jeff Dillon

Are you on The Grid?
Many people are familiar with the idea of grid computing, a methodology for making a collection of computer systems act as one. In my opinion, grid computing is in the same state of affairs that computer networking was in before the Internet took off. Before the Internet, many people knew that computer networking was going to be big but many people and companies were taking very different approaches and using very different technologies. The big change occurred when people started agreeing on a standard set of services to use for acessing the Internet. Services like DNS, http, and TCP/IP are now the standard. The Internet also took off with a special killer app which came out of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, namely the web browser and web server. (I worked at NCSA while I was in studying computer science at UIUC.)

I provide this as an analogy because grid computing today is in a similar state. Many companies are using different technologies and ideas to make grid computing real. The group I work for, N1 Grid Service Provisioning is one such technology. This product allows you to define applications and provision them across a datacenter. However, there is also an academic group called Globus which has been working for quite some time on defining and implementing the standard set of services that may create what we will one day call The Grid. Globus defines a standard set of services for defining Grid Services. Globus is way ahead of the industry in terms of thinking about how resource and application sharing could operate in the future.

The question in my mind is, what will be the killer app that makes everyone need to be running grid services? Will grid computing ever mean anything to the average consumer like the Internet does?