[CAnet - news] There's Grid in them thar clouds

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
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 [Ian Foster has posted an excellent commentary in his blog on the
relationship between grids and clouds.  As well  Grid Today reported On Dec.
6, there was a session on "Utility Computing, Grids, and Virtualization" at
a meeting of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium in St.
Petersburg, Fla. There were some excellent presentations on the relationship
between clouds grids, virtualization, SOA, etc .--BSA]

http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2008160.html

The session was co-hosted by the Open Grid Forum. The proceedings of the
session are available at
http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ServerVirtualization.

Ian Foster commentary
http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/theres-grid-in.html


....

the problems are mostly the same in cloud and grid. There is a common need
to be able to manage large facilities; to define methods by which consumers
discover, request, and use resources provided by the central facilities; and
to implement the often highly parallel computations that execute on those
resources. Details differ, but the two communities are struggling with many
of the same issues.

Unfortunately, at least to date, the methods used to achieve these goals in
today's commercial clouds have not been open and general purpose, but
instead been mostly proprietary and specialized for the specific internal
uses (e.g., large-scale data analysis) of the companies that developed them.
The idea that we might want to enable interoperability between providers (as
in the electric power grid) has not yet surfaced. Grid technologies and
protocols speak precisely to these issues, and should be considered.
...
In building this distributed "cloud" or "grid" ("groud"?), we will need to
support on-demand provisioning and configuration of integrated "virtual
systems" providing the precise capabilities needed by an end-user. We will
need to define protocols that allow users and service providers to discover
and hand off demands to other providers, to monitor and manage their
reservations, and arrange payment. We will need tools for managing both the
underlying resources and the resulting distributed computations. We will
need the centralized scale of today's cloud utilities, and the distribution
and interoperability of today's grid facilities.

Some of the required protocols and tools will come from the smart people at
Amazon and Google. Others will come from the smart people working on grid.
Others will come from those creating whatever we call this stuff after grid
and cloud. It will be interesting to see to what extent these different
communities manage to find common cause, or instead proceed along parallel
paths.


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