Linux Journal: The Role of Linux in Grid Computing

“Today, applications are developed to be geared toward a
specific platform or hosting environment, for example Linux,
Windows 2000, various UNIX flavors, mainframes, J2EE, Microsoft
.NET and so on. Such computing tends to operate within a monolithic
framework in which applications contend for resources as and when
they’re made available for that single platform. For a platform
with limited resources, the resource availability starts decreasing
as the demand for service grows. At such a time, if resources from
other systems could be used or, in turn, the requirements could be
serviced by resources from other systems, the strain on the native
system would reduce considerably and the quality of service being
offered would improve.

“It is this objective that grid computing wants to meet. The
objective of grid-based computing is to virtualize, manage and
allocate distributed physical resources (processing power, memory,
storage, networking) to applications and users on an as-needed
(on-demand) basis–regardless of the resources’ location. Grid
networks transcend physical components, organizational units,
enterprise infrastructure and geographic boundaries. Naturally,
software plays a vital role in determining the success of grid
computing. In this article, we focus on the role of Linux in grid
computing…”

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