Okay class, close your books and turn off your iPods. Here's today's quiz:
- Is a "Grid" computer
- (a) The first laptop?
- (b) A distributed computing model in which lots of networked computers operate together as a virtual computer?
- (c) All of the above?
- (d) None of the above?
And for a bonus question:
- Is a "Griddle" computer
- (a) An Apple G4 iBook with a Sony battery?
- (b) A Dell Inspiron laptop with a Sony battery?
- (c) All of the above?
- (d) None of the above?
Give up? In both cases "All of the above" gets you a passing grade. While I do expect some pushback from the Dynabook crowd about Grid being the "first laptop," don't just take my word for it. Check out wikipedia.org/ wiki/Grid_Compass, which credits the 1982 Grid Compass—with its semiruggedized matte-black magnesium case, nonvolatile bubble memory, and other innovations—with being first out of the gate. But with its $10,000 price tag, it's hard to compare the Grid to today's laptops. By comparison, I recently bought an HP Pavilian laptop with a 17-inch screen for under $500—and they threw a color scanner/printer into the deal. Alas, Grid eventually went belly-up and was acquired by Radio Shack, which launched the true first portable computer—the TRS-80 Model 100—in 1983. What with the Grid, Model 100, and a packet of "pocket computers," Radio Shack had a foot in the portable door, but that's as far as the company got.
Of course, these days "grid computers" have nothing to do with Radio Shack, and little to do with laptops. Rather, grid computing is an architecture based on multiple networked computers, virtualized as one large computer system.
Until recently, grid computing has generally been a topic of interest to researchers. However, that is rapidly changing, with the big dogs fueling commercial interest in grids. Oracle has its Oracle RAC (www.oracle.com/technology/products/ database/clustering/), a scalable cluster database with a shared cache architecture that's grid enabled. Likewise, IBM has its "Grid and Grow" (www.ibm.com/grid/) offerings, designed to enable organizations to incorporate grid computing into their infrastructures. Most recently, for instance, IBM launched its Windows- or Linux-based "Grid and Grow for Actuarial Analysis" to help insurance companies improve financial risk and capital management, and provide faster time to market with new products (but not faster pay-off on claims?).
Still, it's the smaller companies that are making grid computing really interesting. 3tera (www.3tera.com), for instance, provides a grid operating system that separates hardware resources from application deployment. Separating applications from underlying resources means that, instead of dedicating servers to applications, servers can be built into a grid on which multiple applications will run. Servers and storage can be added and removed as needed without interrupting on-going processes. This type of flexibility is particularly useful in fast-moving, always-changing Web 2.0 environs.
Also in the Web 2.0 and grid space is ActiveGrid (www.activegrid.com), which is providing tools for transitioning from traditional 3-tier architectures to grids. ActiveGrid's goal is to integrate existing services, applications, and databases into Web 2.0 applications that are deployed on clusters of commodity computers.
Then there's Digipede Technologies (www.digipede.com), which is providing grid computing for Microsoft's .NET. (Digipede's Robert Anderson and Dan Ciruli examine how an SOA can scale using distributed computing technologies in the this issue; see page 22.) The Digipede solution consists of a number of individual tools, ranging from Digipede Agents (which manage individual desktops, servers, or cluster nodes) and Digipede Servers (responsible for managing system workflow), to adminstration tools and the Digipede Framework SDK, which lets you grid-enable your applications. According to Digipede, you can grid-enable any application with as few as 20 lines of new code. The API supports distributed execution of .NET objects and COM servers.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that the Argonne National Lab has recently released a new version of its freely available Access Grid Toolkit (www.accessgrid.org). Access Grid is a collection of resources and interfaces to grid middleware and visualization environments, supporting group-to-group interactions across the grid. For example, the Access Grid is used for large-scale distributed meetings, collaborative work sessions, seminars, lectures, tutorials, and training.
And the "Griddle" computer? It really does exist—sort of. Griddle (griddle.dev.java.net/) is a flexible space-like collection implementation that's based in part on the Javaspaces API. It's what you might call one hot API.
Jonathan Erickson
Editor-in-Chief
