The Grid: Past, Present, Future
1 The Grid: past, present, future Fran Berman,1 Geoffrey Fox,2 and Tony Hey3,4 1University of California, San Diego, California, 2Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 3EPSRC, Swindon, United Kingdom, 4University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom 1.1 THE GRID The Grid is the computing and data management infrastructure that will provide the elec- tronic underpinning for a global society in business, government, research, science and entertainment [1–5]. Grids idealized in Figure 1.1 integrate networking, communication, computation and information to provide a virtual platform for computation and data man- agement in the same way that the Internet integrates resources to form a virtual platform for information. The Grid is transforming science, business, health and society. In this book we consider the Grid in depth, describing its immense promise, potential and com- plexity from the perspective of the community of individuals working hard to make the Grid vision a reality. The Grid infrastructure will provide us with the ability to dynamically link together resources as an ensemble to support the execution of large-scale, resource-intensive, and distributed applications. Grid Computing – Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality, edited by F. Berman, G. Fox and T. Hey. 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 10 FRAN BERMAN, GEOFFREY FOX, AND TONY HEY Data Advanced acquisition visualization Analysis Computational resources Imaging instruments Large-scale databases Figure 1.1 Managed digital resources as building blocks of the Grid. Large-scale Grids are intrinsically distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic. They pro- mise effectively infinite cycles and storage, as well as access to instruments, visualization devices and so on without regard to geographic location.
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