www.bioline.org.br/ja Qualities of Grid Computing that can last for Ages

ABSTRACT: Grid computing has emerged as an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing based on its abilities on large-scale resource sharing and services. And it will even become more popular because of the benefits it can offer over the traditional supercomputers, and other forms of distributed computing. This paper examines these benefits and also discusses why grid computing will continue to enjoy greater popularity and patronage in many years to come. Finally, we discussed about virtual organization (VO) as one of the key characteristics of Grid computing. @ JASEM Grid computing has recently enjoyed an increase in popularity as a distributed computing architecture that is becoming highly suitable for corporate computing. The reasons for this increase in the past decade or so are not far fetched. A limited IT budget resulting in a lean economy has forced enterprises to more fully utilize their existing computing assets. This has also led them to become more flexible to respond to rapidly evolving markets by being able to intelligently allocate finite resources to the appropriate business applications (Akinyemi, et al, 2007). Grid computing is a special type of parallel computing, which relies on complete computer (with on-board) CPU, storage, power supply, network interface, etc. connected to a network (private, public or the internet) by a conventional network interface, such as Ethernet. This is in contrast to the traditional notion of supercomputer, which has many processors connected by a local high-speed computer bus (Berman, et al, 2003). Grid computing is useful in areas that requires enormous computing power and challenges such as financial modeling, earthquake simulation, and climate (or weather) modeling as well as drug discovery, seismic analysis, economic forecasting, e-commerce and Web services