Towards a World Wide Grid?

Roland Piquepaille writes "In recent months, the concept of 'cloud computing' was all the buzz. European researchers think about another name, the World Wide Grid, which could run on top of the Internet. In an article to appear soon, ICT Results will report about the g-Eclipse project. As the scientists said, 'the g-Eclipse project aims to build an integrated workbench framework to access the power of existing Grid infrastructures. The framework will be built on top of the reliable eco-system of the Eclipse community to enable a sustainable development.' The project started in July 2006 and was successfully completed in June 2008 for a total cost of €2.5 million, including a EU contribution of €1.96 million."

huh?

[mrfriendly]

I'm a comp sci nerd, but I didn't get anything from the summary. I'm definately not going to read the article.

"Grid" = "design by committee"?

[dkegel]

I am not a cloud expert, but: Anything with "grid" in it makes me think "designed by committee" and "sucks"... and the fact that the effort described in TFA was funded by the EU doesn't make me feel any better about it. Maybe it would make more sense to wait until something like Hadoop takes over the world, then just standardize existing practice. (Apologies to my friends in the grid world.)

Do we really need this?

[Brett Howard]

Now granted its a really cool idea and its even quite handy for organizations who need more power. There have been times when I'm sitting at work running an FPGA simulation and I click the go button and go for a walk.

At home reading some news doing some simple development and hell even compiling a new kernel here and there I'm generally happy with the speed of my laptop. Hell I'm even contemplating giving up some speed in exchange for portability so long as I don't have to skimp on resolution.

Much of the world is already in a power crunch. Not only a power crunch but a fuel crunch in general. So when we decide that gas is too expensive and we all start plugging our cars into the grid the problem gets even worse. Can you imagine if ALL of the world's computers hit 100% usage all the time so they could constantly be servicing who ever needed resources at the moment?

Laptop's probably wouldn't want to opt into this network for the huge hit they'd take in battery life. Not to mention the increased bandwidth requirements needed for what most users consider background tasks.