The History of the Grid
1 The History of the Grid 2 3 4 Ian Foster*+, Carl Kesselman§= 5 *Computation Institute, Argonne National Laboratory & University of Chicago 6 +Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago 7 §Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Southern 8 California 9 =Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California 10 11 12 13 Abstract. With the widespread availability of high-speed networks, it becomes 14 feasible to outsource computing to remote providers and to federate resources from 15 many locations. Such observations motivated the development, from the mid- 16 1990s onwards, of a range of innovative Grid technologies, applications, and 17 infrastructures. We review the history, current status, and future prospects for Grid 18 computing. 19 Keywords: Grid, Globus, distributed computing, scientific computing, cloud 20 computing 21 22 23 Introduction 24 In the 1990s, inspired by the availability of high-speed wide area 25 networks and challenged by the computational requirements of new 26 applications, researchers began to imagine a computing infrastructure 27 that would “provide access to computing on demand” [78] and permit 28 “flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic 29 collections of individuals, institutions, and resources” [81]. 30 This vision was referred to as the Grid [151], by analogy to the 31 electric power grid, which provides access to power on demand, 32 achieves economies of scale by aggregation of supply, and depends on 33 large-scale federation of many suppliers and consumers for its effective 34 operation. The analogy is imperfect, but many people found it inspiring. 35 Some 15 years later, the Grid more or less exists.
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