Plugging Into Computing Power Grids

Computerworld - Grid computing has attracted a lot of attention recently as companies have begun to promote the concept of accessing unlimited computing power from anywhere in the world as easily as users now log on to the Internet. While that sounds revolutionary, it's really an incremental step with a great deal of developmental history behind it. In fact, enterprises of all types are already using a simple form of grid computing within their firewalls to economically meet processing needs.

Just as storage-area networks (SAN) virtualized enterprise storage needs, grid computing virtualizes processing power. With it, a process doesn't run on a specific assigned CPU in a particular box; rather, it goes to any available processor in the network. A small task uses a single CPU, while larger jobs are split up and run on multiple CPUs simultaneously. The jobs can be assigned using either a centralized or peer-to-peer structure. Once limited to university research clusters, grid computing is making inroads into the business community, offering supercomputer performance at PC prices.

At Montreal-based Caprion Pharmaceuticals Inc., for example, a four-CPU server needs 720 hours to analyze a single biological sample from one of Caprion's eight mass spectrometers. Mixed in with these resource-intensive computational cycles is a constant stream of smaller tasks. The company turned to grid computing to efficiently address the mix of large and small jobs on a single platform.

"Biotechnology changes so rapidly that 12 months from now, we could be doing very different kinds of computing," says Paul Kearney, director of bioinformatics. "We need a flexible computing platform that not only meets today's needs, but the future ones we don't know about yet."

If you feel confused on the subject of grid computing, you're not alone. "People envision grid computing as meaning everyone being connected planetwide," explains Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., a consulting firm that specializes in large-scale computing. "That is only part of it, and largely a future part."

Grid computing follows along the development track of technologies such as the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture, Microsoft Corp.'s Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) or the Open Group's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). More recently, the Globus Project (www.globus.org) has developed standards for large-scale computing over the Internet.

"Organizations have been doing grid computing for 10 years," says Stacey Quandt, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "People are talking about it now because of the potential global grid, but many already have grids."

Examining the Options

There are three main types of grid: cluster, campus and global. The definitions aren't set in stone. Rather, they represent rough divisions on the continuum of ways in which organizations can share computing power.