Five Facts

GRID COMPUTING

• A computer network connected together via the Internet, satellite or optic fibre links can be used by various organisations for sharing processing power converting the thousands of computers with idle CPU power into a single virtual supercomputer.
• All a customer needs is access to the grid via the Internet or any other link, and grid software, which distributes pieces of a program to thousands of computers for processing.
• While Grid Computing primarily started in academic institutions, giants such as IBM and Sun are looking at giving the grid story a corporate twist.
• A famous and much-publicised example of Grid Computing is the SETI@Home (Search for Extraterrestrial life) project in which PC users all over the world donate unused processor cycles to help in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life by analyzing signals coming from outer space.
• Advantages of a grid include the ability to make more cost-effective use computer resources and harness the resources of many computers.