Tying a LAN of computers together to do cooperative work isn’t a new idea. Combining several thousand computers spread across the globe into a commodity service like water or electricity is. But is the “computing grid” ready for us to plug in? Here’s a report.
In May of this year, IBM and a little-known video game developer named Butterfly.net launched the first ever computing grid for online video games. Butterfly.net’s service is an intriguing one: sell computer cycles as a commodity. Like a utility company, the Butterfly Grid promises to make processing power available to video game companies looking to outsource some of the back-end processing that their online games require. Besides being a novel idea, the Butterfly Grid is an interesting milestone for the grid community. For the first time, a commercial enterprise is betting its business on a grid — a technology that’s grown up and come of age in the scientific and research communities.
And nobody is more excited by the grid’s commercial prospects than IBM — the company whose data centers are physically hosting the Butterfly Grid. In the New York Times, IBM Vice President Scott Penberthy called the Butterfly Grid “the first ray of light” in the commercial grid market.
Now, after years of nurturing this offshoot of supercomputing, mainstream vendors like IBM, Sun, and HP are pronouncing grid as the future of networked computing. But what is the grid, really? Is it simply a few old computer science concepts dusted off and spiffed up with a new moniker, bigger bandwidth, and faster computers? Is the Internet a grid? What about a cluster of workstations? Why is that not a grid? Well, the answer to these…
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