After a very informative presentation by the Nucleus group, I researched more on cloud computing and related topics. I came across Grid Computing which infact has been around for quite some time. If you compare Grid computing with Cloud computing, you notice that both are geographically distributed computing methods. I have tried to differentiate Grid and Cloud computing in this post.
What is Grid Computing: "Grid computing (or the use of computational grids) is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains applied to a common task, usually to a scientific, technical or business problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or the need to process large amounts of data." - www.wikipedia.org
What is Cloud Computing: "Cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them." - www.wikipedia.org
Grid has been around for more than a decade and cloud has been around for only the last couple of years.
Grid shares local resources and geographically available resources whereas cloud is more about making large data centres available.
Grid mainly comprises of hetereogenous resources whereas cloud is more inclined towards homogenous resources.
Grid is always locally owned and managed whereas clouds are centrally owned and managed.
Grids are interoperable which infact is a very important characteristic of it, whereas cloud is generally not that interoperable.
If anyone has had any practical experience with Grid or Cloud computing and can shed some light on this, please do share your thoughts with us.
For more information please go through http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-cloudgrid/
-Gautam Velayuthan
Posts
Hi Gautam,
ReplyDeleteIt is very interesting and intuitive that you have made this direct comparison of grid vs. cloud computing.
It's my view that despite their geographically dispersed similarities, that's about where their similarities end. Grid computing aims to take resources from multiple computers and apply them to common tasks. Cloud computing doesn't quite work like this, but rather allows remote users to use and share resources.
I think these two topics could be considered subtopics, perhaps under the header of "geographically dispersed computing methods."
good post, gautam, thanks.
Micheal, you hit the nail on the head!
ReplyDeleteMany people tend to confuse Grid Computing and Cloud computing although they are very different from each other.
Excellent analysis, Gautam, thanks.
ReplyDelete-Michael Morgan
Here is another difference between Grid and cloud computing based on the allocation of the requests.
ReplyDeleteMostly grid computing is used in environments where there are very few number of systems but with large allocation requests.So only few requests are served at a time and all other process need to wait till the resources are released.
Cloud computing accepts lots of small number of requests.All the allocations are real time and there there is no provision for queueing allocations until someone else releases resources.
So, Grid computing uses sophisticated batch job scheduling algorithms of parallel computations.And Cloud computing uses altogether a different resource allocation methods to serve its purpose.
I have come across this difference from the following link which helped me in giving good understanding of both the concepts.
Reference : http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/07/07/cloud-computing-vs-grid-computing/
Once again Asha has proven that she's a lot smarter than I am... unfortunately that's not too hard to do.
ReplyDeleteNice Post...
ReplyDeleteIts a great information about Computing. I had attended a Computing Conference before. Its Cloudslam09, very impressive and informative.
ReplyDelete