developerWorks: Next-Generation Grids Focus on App Integration

“In the past, when developers referred to building a computing
grid, they primarily had the hardware and operating systems level
in mind. Grid computing was all about brute force — tying together
as many machines as possible — to crunch through computationally
intensive tasks like financial market simulations, or oil and gas
exploration.

“Today, the focus of grid computing development has moved up a
step, to the application level. While sophisticated hardware
linkages aren’t exactly commonplace, they’re much better understood
than they were in the past, and form the basis for many commercial
platforms available today. The next challenge for enterprises is to
integrate heterogeneous systems and applications into a
wider-ranging logical grid, one that can bring new performance
highs to critical enterprise applications.

“While enterprises can always build their own middleware,
linking this wide a range of devices, managing device-to-device
security, and scheduling and coordinating jobs between devices with
different levels of computing power can pose thorny problems for
grid developers. At minimum, developers at companies interested in
an application grid face a steep learning curve…”

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