The Future of Grid Computing: Grid computing is expected to become a mainstream business-enterprise topology during the rest of the decade. This article gives an overview of current and emerging technologies and strategic planning in the areas of grid computing, distributed computing, and network topologies.

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by Enrique Castro-Leon and Joel Munter, Intel® Solution Services. Intel Corp.

A number of technology transitions are taking place or will take place within the next five years that will lower the barriers that exist today to deploy, maintain, and run applications on computer grids. Most of the literature dwells on performance gains and application capabilities enabled by the new technologies. Perhaps a more interesting exercise is to take these transitions to their logical conclusions and speculate as to what new business models will become feasible. A second exercise is to determine the optimal strategies for organizations contemplating grid deployment.

The grid is not only of interest to scientists and engineers running applications, the traditional user community for grids. Grid deployments in the next decade will encompass a broad swath of industry verticals that will take the grid well beyond its High Performance Computing (HPC) roots. Beyond capabilities delivered to end users, every participant in the ecosystem has a vested interest in the acceleration in grid uptake: users enjoying new and powerful capabilities, vendors seeking new channels and additional revenues, and organizations discovering that grid deployment can bring associated cost reductions and a welcome competitive edge.

While attempts at predicting discontinuous events are not usually very accurate at determining actual outcome, the authors believe that the process of building a thought experiment is intrinsically useful. Moreover, the readers, far from being mere witnesses, will find that these ideas will bring other powerful ideas by association that will lead to a positive influence when it comes to grid evolution.

Hardware Configurations: Nodes, Clusters, and Grids
For the first part of this discussion, we will use a simple three-level abstraction to describe the following grid hardware:

• Nodes—A node is a computer in the traditional sense: a desktop or laptop PC, or a server in any incarnation: a self-standing pedestal, a rack module, or a blade, containing one or more CPUs in an SMP, NUMA, or ccNUMA configuration[1].
  
• Cluster—a collection of related nodes.
  
• Grid—a collection of clusters.

The nodes in a cluster are connected via some fast interconnect technology. Before the introduction of InfiniBand* and PCI Express* technologies, there was a tradeoff between a relatively high-performance, single-sourced, expensive technology and an economical, standards-based, but lower-performance technology. Ethernet, a technology designed for networking, is commonly used in cost-constrained clusters. This setup introduces bottlenecks in parallel applications that require tight node-to-node coordination. The adoption of InfiniBand-based interconnects promises to remove this tradeoff.



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