History of Grid Computing:
Grid had its beginnings in the mid 1990's in scientific computing
but the notion of distributed computing has been around for decades.
Grid was originally conceived and designed in this community to
allow access to computing resources that were geographically dispersed.
The notion was that underutilized resources in places other than
where the researchers were physically located could be used. Also
fundamental in the formative thinking was the prospect of sharing
access to data, typically in the form of files that were being jointly
produced and used by collaborators in disparate locations.
Before discussing more about Grids lets go back to birth
of distributed computing:
In the early 1970's when computers were first linked by networks,
the idea of harnessing unused CPU cycles was born. A few early experiments
with distributed computing — including a pair of programs
called Creeper and Reaper — ran on the Internet's predecessor,
In 1973, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) installed the
first Ethernet network and the first full-fledged distributed computing
effort was underway. Scientists John F. Shoch and Jon A. Hupp created
a worm, as they called it, and envisioned it moving from machine
to machine using idle resources for beneficial purposes.
In another effort, Richard Crandall, now a distinguished scientist
at Apple, started putting idle, networked NeXT computers to
work. Crandall installed software that allowed the machines, when
not in use, to perform computations and to combine efforts with
other machines on the network. In 1991, Zilla won the ComputerWorld
Smithsonian Award for Science.
In another project started in 1995, I-WAY (Information Wide Area
Year) was an experimental high-performance network linking many
high-performance computers and advanced visualization environments.
The idea was not to create a new network, but to integrate existing
high bandwidth networks. So I-WAY unified resources at multiple
supercomputing centers. It was designed to provide an infrastructure
to a range of high performance applications. The reason why I-WAY
is so important is that it is the precursor of Globus, which is
the de facto standard for developing grid applications.
The Internet brings new scale.
Distributed computing scaled to a global level with the maturation
of the Internet in the 1990's. Two projects in particular have proven
that the concept works extremely well — even better than many
experts had anticipated.
The first of these revolutionary projects used thousands of independently
owned computers across the Internet to crack encryption codes. This
project, the first of its kind, was called distributed.net
— affectionately known as "dnet".
The second, and the most successful and popular of distributed
computing projects in history, is the SETI@home
project. Over three million people — the largest number
of volunteers for any Internet distributed computing project to
date — have installed the SETI@home software agent since the
project started in May 1999. This project conclusively proved that
distributed computing could accelerate computing project results
while managing project costs.
Since 1999 grid computing has further developed to encompass more
of IT than just computers and data. As we detail later, Grid enables
a loosely-coupled, service-based IT environment. It is the broad
spectrum of IT "resources" that can be a "service"
that elevates Grid beyond just scientific computing. Importantly,
Grid will have applicability in a larger cross-section of the IT
world, specifically the enterprise. Enterprise is the commercial,
large and medium business IT space.
AvarSYS is focused on delivering Grid technology to the enterprise
to enable our customers to derive benefits in the form of reduced
costs and complexity and to allow for doing things that could not
be efficiently achieved before.