Wired reports on the fifth Global Grid Forum, held recently in Edinburgh:
Most of the excitement centers on the integration of grid computing and Web services: The Web provides the service, and the grid offers the processing punch to deliver it. The GGF is finalizing the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) to deliver that integration.
“OGSA is very like TCP/IP. It won’t create any applications in itself but it will create a binding set of standards for services across the grid. It’s almost like the operating system for the grid,” says Tom Hawk, general manager, grid computing with IBM.
It is an advance that will be signaled by major improvements in services, speed and security of the Internet, but it will remain otherwise invisible to the users themselves.
Take single sign-on, for example, where a user signs-on once per session, and a separate site takes care of all the authentication and verification, delivering an OK signal to any sites the user visits.
Grid computing will allow a much higher degree of security for more speed, with the security processing handled by the wider grid rather than the already stressed-out home PC.
Gaming is another area where grid and Web services integration will create a new Internet on steroids. Right now, Sony and Microsoft are looking at distributed gaming, while Butterfly.net is another project developing massive multiplayer games using grid computing. A grid game developer’s kit is available at its website.
I’ll be writing later in my Tech Talk series about Grid Computing as one of the Tech’s 10X Tsunamis.
