Description
Internet computing and Grid‑technologies promise to change the way we tackle complex problems. They will enable large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional and geographical boundaries.
Internet computing is just a special case of something much more powerful: the ability for communities to share resources as they tackle common goals. Business today is increasingly international and multidisciplinary. It is not unusual for corporations to span states, countries and continents. It is also not unusual for corporations to bundle together a variety of industries and to collect information and generate expertise in various areas of business, technology and science. E‑mail and the World Wide Web provide basic mechanisms that allow such groups to work together. But what if they could link their data, computers and other resources into a single virtual office? So-called Grid‑technologies seek to make this possible by providing the protocols, services and software development kits needed to enable flexible, controlled resource sharing on a large scale.
The World Wide Web has facilitated unprecedented ways of speedy global information sharing. The Grid‑technology will build on this by allowing facilitating the global sharing of not just information but of tangible assets to be used at a distance. Very large databases - literary terabytes and petabytes of information - that now are geographically confined will become Grid‑sharable. This is why - in addition to the computational Grid technology recent efforts are directed into developing data-Grid infrastructures[1].
[1] The most outstanding example is the European Data Grid project (EDG) and its successor EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe) headed by CERN and founded by the European Commission.
Included in
Information Retrieval on the Grid? Results and suggestions from Project GRACE
Internet computing and Grid‑technologies promise to change the way we tackle complex problems. They will enable large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional and geographical boundaries.
Internet computing is just a special case of something much more powerful: the ability for communities to share resources as they tackle common goals. Business today is increasingly international and multidisciplinary. It is not unusual for corporations to span states, countries and continents. It is also not unusual for corporations to bundle together a variety of industries and to collect information and generate expertise in various areas of business, technology and science. E‑mail and the World Wide Web provide basic mechanisms that allow such groups to work together. But what if they could link their data, computers and other resources into a single virtual office? So-called Grid‑technologies seek to make this possible by providing the protocols, services and software development kits needed to enable flexible, controlled resource sharing on a large scale.
The World Wide Web has facilitated unprecedented ways of speedy global information sharing. The Grid‑technology will build on this by allowing facilitating the global sharing of not just information but of tangible assets to be used at a distance. Very large databases - literary terabytes and petabytes of information - that now are geographically confined will become Grid‑sharable. This is why - in addition to the computational Grid technology recent efforts are directed into developing data-Grid infrastructures[1].
[1] The most outstanding example is the European Data Grid project (EDG) and its successor EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe) headed by CERN and founded by the European Commission.