K Data Grid

Grid Computing

Most industries today have become so dynamic that organizations must consistently seek and adapt change to survive and prosper. Factors such as more diversified customer preferences, technological advances, increased threats of competition and a global economy more intense among the forces causing the change. Organizations need to become more adaptable for kissing Charles Darwin, that "this is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but one that is most adaptable to change".

A survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in March 2004 shows that 47% of CEOs of companies with higher growth in the United States believe their strongest factor Success is having flexible strategies to respond to accelerating business change. However, recently implemented information systems still tend to ignore this need for flexibility and at times difficult to scale and customize, thus limiting the ability of a firm to react quickly to business needs changing.

Over the past two decades, we have consistently experienced a radical change in how we store and process digital information. Every few years ago had a breakpoint industry, an important concept that has changed radically new calculation of how computers are used and information systems are implemented. Examples include graphic and more user-friendly interfaces, the notion of client / server and Internet. These factors have somewhat helped and contributed to computers position as a necessary commodity. In addition, with the steadily declining cost of hardware, and better and cheaper network bandwidth, computers become more ubiquitous. The Internet has evolved and is now regarded as probably the most effective communication. While technology tends to evolve in a non-linear, Moore's Law has ensured that the processing power has increased exponentially.

While this helps to facilitate the hoarding and dissemination of information, ICT professionals today still face difficult challenges. ICT Budgets grew rapidly in the late 90's in anticipation of the Y2K problem. In recent years many ICT services have even been asked to reduce their budgets when they were expected to continue to provide appropriate information infrastructure to enable organizations to enhance their products and possibly gain a competitive advantage. Cycles replacement of equipment are collected have increased. Generally, budgets for ICT has not grown in recent years match the IT needs of organizations, while the workload continues to increase, the capacity to handle them are not.

In some cases increasing computing needs of a company could find itself in a lot of computing power that is not properly used. Why? Consider for example the use of a server machine. Most of its capacity real-time processing is not used at all. But perhaps sometimes because of a broad process and long term is executed or the number of users connected temporarily increase the server may know endup processing overhead. It has been estimated that on average, a computer uses only about 5% to 8% of its processing power (EuropeanCeo, 2005). While, as Hendry (2004) reports, load balancing can help to distribute processing and communications activity, similar servers that experience spikes in CPU usage is only used for the rest of the day and possibly find with a large amount of unused computing capacity.

Thus, questions are inevitable, it is really possible to increase and improve unique source of firm power load, while most of the time the existing processing power are not used? How can we ensure that computer resources a company are well balanced and distributed, to minimize waste and ultimately justify the additional investment in ICT infrastructure?

The basic concept that gives an overview of the response to these issues back to the 70s when the concept of computing distributed was born. Today we are seeing a growing interest among the business communities in what is known as, Grid Computing.

Definition
Renowned organizations are promoting the grid on a large scale and different definitions can be found. It has become a fashionable term. Dr. Ian Foster, professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Distributed Systems Lab at Argonne National Laboratory, a pioneer in Grid Computing, provided that the definition for the layman as the technology "to enable the sharing of computing resources across borders institutional. "research firm Gartner, Inc. defines grid computing as a way to solve computing tasks using resources that are shared by more than one owner to coordinate and solve more problems.

The concept of Grid Computing was first popular among academics, research and scientific communities. It has been used for functions requiring a substantial amount of power calculation. However, in recent years a growing number of organizations adopting early and trying to take advantage of this technology.

It are many examples where the grid has been applied. Among the research communities, University of Oxford uses grid technology to analyze molecules of 3.5 billion to develop their fight against cancer potential. Same is done by Stanford to analyze protein role in keeping people healthy. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project (SETI) is another example. Here, download the volunteer and install a free program to process and analyze massive amounts of data looking for evidence of radio transmissions from extraterrestrial life. When counting all the processing power that the PC supply is like having a super big. Grid technologies has also played a major role in identifying the world's largest prime number known. This was part of the project Marsens where scientists have identified the 43rd Prime Marsens 230,402,457-1. – A number that contains 9,152,052 digits.

Business Application
Within the business community, the grid concept is much more popular among large companies. Baum, editor of the edition of Oracle Corporation, shows that these companies are primarily attracted by the savings that technology can offer. Mainstay Partners conducted a study to assess the return on investment platforms of grid technology company now use seven participating companies. It was concluded that the adaptation of network technologies has resulted in an average of 43 percent savings in cost equipment. Much of the savings have been credited to the passage of a symmetric multiprocessor server to a large number of servers lower cost. With the use of Grid technologies in the pattern has made similar or at times even more computing power than the larger system, but with less cost. Baum report adds that the grids in these companies were used for a variety of applications, including planning Enterprise Resource (ERP), decision support, customer relationship management (CRM) and Management of Supply Chain Management (SCM).

However, companies operating in the financial services industry, drug discovery and weather modeling are first more likely to benefit from Grid technologies, because they are involved in scientific computing and complex mathematical and therefore require an additional computing power. So are businesses that tend to process large amounts of data for their business intelligence activities. However, organizations are increasingly encouraged to adopt Grid technologies, even for core transactional systems, since May grids facilitate more problems of storage space.

Difficulties encountered by the Grid Computing
IDC, the market intelligence and advisory services farm, we refer to grid computing as the fifth generation of computing, after client-server and multi-levels (Table 1).

Yet, according to IDC, the technology must still be "regularized" and to overcome various challenges. IDC believes that these concerns in some cases are more perception than reality, and as organizations gain more experience with this distributed approach, their concerns will be put to rest.

In addition, research conducted by the 451 Group shows that the software licensing, security and bandwidth are among the things that can disrupt the grid deployments.

Conclusion
While grid computing has yet to achieve broad acceptance in the commercial space, However, market analysts indicate that the technology is here to stay. As Tom Hawk, general manager of grid computing for IBM said: "The Web is the sharing of information. The grid is sharing resources.

About the Author

Sandro Azzopardi is a professional author who writes articles on his web site and local newspapers.
http://www.theinfopit.com/technology/gridcomputing-1.php

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