The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure

I don't understand some of the critical reviews of this book. The fact is that Grids do exist today and are being used by Research oriented companies. About two dozen companies are already serving clients in the realm of grid computing. Platform Computing, United Devices, and Avaki are just three companies who are helping to create the future of the grid computing. The web succeded because it connected everybody. Until larger grids are contructed for business enterprises I agree that grid computing will not grow. The book does a great job of showing what the future may be like in terms of grid computing. Someday your computing resources will come from your local Grid Computing Company just as you get electricity from your Power Company. How that comes to be is still the ultimate question.

The Grid technology provides an infrastructure to couple computers (PCs, workstations, clusters, & so on), scientific instruments, storage, databases, application kernels, and people across the globe/Internet and present them as an unified, integrated resource to the user. The Grid tools hide complexities associated with accessing these resources and offers efficient mechanism to access them transparently. Using resource brokers, you can access compute power and application services as easy as accessing electricity today with ease. Still not convinced, read this book!Still there is lot left to explore and I think we are still looking for a "brand new" killer application for the Grid. That helps in computational Grids making impact on the world economy similar to that of electrical Grids. Master the principles presented in the book and develop applications that revolutionize the Grid as much as Web did for the Internet and the world!

The Grid's most important function is as a manifesto: It says, hey guys, we will plug-in a simple PC into the wall, and we will have at our fingertips any computational power we need. We can simulate a crash of cars with a very fine precision, in program which needs perhaps 4 weeks to run on supercomputers filling a large room. Some pieces of software, named tools, will find the fastest way to any computer in the world, or to any number of computers in the world, which are available for you. You can hire them, you can lease them, you can pay as you use them. We may even buy a Grid Card, like a plastic calling card, and do all the computing, until the card is depleted.All it will be possible. One day, every single supercomputer in the world will be part of the GRID making money for its owners. How people will collaborate? Here there is a void to be filled by some giant future computer utilities corporations, not yet born. AOL can become one of them, and increase its size hundreds of times. The telecom giants of today can take leadership. Or some new start up, a name no one has heard yet, will become the code named GRID Inc. But the GRID Inc. (my own fiction) is not a fiction in 'The Grid' edited by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman: the reader sees the blueprint. In the next edition, we would love to add the chapter for the Global Resources Director (GRD) a software that optimizes resources in a distributed heterogeneous environment.The people minds shift. Computer Power as electricity? Will we have at home a power-meter measured in a computing unit, something equivalent to Kilowatts? Why not?.Ladies and Gentlemen, the GRID is coming. Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman are the first to announce it.The rest is history.

There is a lot of hype these days about the Next Generation Internet (NGI), the National Science Foundation's High Performance Connections Program to very-high broadband connection services (NSF HPC vBNS), and the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development's Internet2 Project (UCAID I2). I'd strongly recommend that anyone who is trying to figure out the what? and why? and who? of the emerging advance networks take time to read "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure." This weighty volume provides the reader a good baseline about the applications, the programming tools, the services and the infrastructure that is being put into place to serve current and future research and education communities. The book is a collection of articles written by those who are building the various pieces. Some chapters are more easily read than others -- just as some topics are more easily understood. Whether network engineer or manager, there is something here for everyone.