Ian Foster, Senior Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, has stated that grid technology consists of 3 basic ideas.

In his article What is the Grid? A Three Point Checklist Foster stated that a grid has the 3 following features.

Computing resources are not administered centrally.
Open standards are used.
Non-trivial quality of service is achieved.

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Hello Hidden,

Thanks for the input. There are so many different opinions and views out there in regards to what grid computing means.. It's good to see the scientific guidelines and definition.

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I would add that an essential element of grid computing is that there is an array of nearly identical computing elements that can be deployed in parallel to solve computational problems, be they scientific or business-related. This requires that there be some software associated with the hardware grid that can allocate the hardware resources appropriately, and that there are software applications that can break the computation problem to be solved down into numerous pieces that can be worked on in parallel. Grid computing is pretty much useless for applications that are not written to process information in parallel.

The beauty of grid computing is that today, a lot of applications are made up of many sepate programs running in parallel, which can be distributed across a grid to improve performance. This especially goes for most web-based applications, as well as the underlying databases that support them.l

Thank you for explaining it a bit better Eric.

So really grid computing is in a way distributing the applications / and/or / computations in parallel across several peices of hardware. Hence breaking the application into several compartments which leads to quicker and faster computing .. right?

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