“So tell me about grid”

Grid computing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Grid computing is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems. Grids provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by breaking them down into many smaller ones, or provide the ability to perform many more computations at once than would be possible on a single computer, by modeling a parallel division of labor between processes.”

This is a good article introducing grid.

I was in a meeting with one of our risk business managers and he asked me for a explanation of grid. “What is grid, tell me in simple terms, i’m not a geek, my daughter looks after our pc at home. How can it help me?”

So here’s my definition (all be it over simplified with a leap of faith that the applications are suitable for grid).

I walk into a supermarket with £100. I purchase 100 products (each different types/sizes/prices). At the moment, what happens is I go to the checkout, unload my shopping to the check out, the check out girl then scans my items, one after the other. There are issues with this, first of all, the till might seize, the barcode might not be read correctly, or worse the checkout girl might need to take a break. The time taken to complete my shopping, therefore can be ‘averaged out’ and as long as things go ok, I’ll be home in time for tea.

With grid the following happens. I have my £100, with my 100 products. I turn up to personal shopping man, who then splits up all 100 items along the 5 free tills, giving each till as much load as it can handle, I deal with the personal shopper, not the till. I am independent of the till/checkout part of the experience.

– If the till 1 reboots, the workload is distributed to the other tills, there will be a delay, but the shopping will be completed.
– If the barcode is wrong, the shopping will continue, my shopping will comprise of 99 items, not 100, but at least i get most of my shopping.
– If the checkout girl takes a break, again, the items scanned are added to my bill, the remaining work is rescheduled to the other tills.

All be it a simple way of explaining it.

In short, grid:
Allows you to be independent of most infrastructure failures (network/datacenter excluded)
Allows you to fully resource your infrastructure – if you know your pc isn’t doing anything overnight, allocate it some tasks
Enables your application to be more ‘redundant’ – on the risk side of your business, the overnight reports can be very important, it’s therefore important that your IT is playing in the same way, it is better to be in a position where you might have the majority of your overnight reports than none at all, particularly if one job or part of your report was the source of the problem.

I’ve got a diagram and a presentation on it.

5 Responses to ““So tell me about grid””

1. martin says:

   November 9, 2006 at 00:54

   Check out http://web.mac.com/martinmacleod/iWeb/Site/Blog/grid.ppt

2. Ewan says:

   November 9, 2006 at 11:56

   Excellent!

3. selsnviu says:

   September 30, 2007 at 01:51

   Thanks for the post.
   Great info.

4. Duasomoug says:

   December 4, 2007 at 06:38

   very interesting point of view, has never been conceived of this .

5. Ewan says:

   May 13, 2009 at 10:29

   Excellent!

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