Getting on the Grid

This review discusses grid computing that is a low-cost way to harness the central processing units of a group of workstations. The grid can be made up of any number of central processing units (CPU), and they may be far-flung or within the same company, or even in the same department. Grid computing puts to work on the grid all available CPUs at idle workstations and thus does away with the need for powerful servers or supercomputers. Sun Microsystems Inc., Santa Clara, CA, and IBM of Armonk, New York, have both released software within the past three years that can divide and farm out pieces of an application to several thousand linked computers. Microsoft is developing grid-computing software for use with its products, as are Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, CA, and others. Grid software is written in Linux, the open-standards operating system. However, because no gatekeeping technology is currently in place for grids, the hard work of IT managers seeking to implement grid technology comes when negotiating policies among departments and setting up grids accordingly.