Harnessing the Power of the Grid

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

The unused processing capacity in this world is amazing. Every day, millions of people leave their computers on and walk away to do something else. The computers lay idle with nothing to process. As a person, I cherish the time when I am free. The time when I don't have to do work is a time to relax, enjoy and recharge my batteries.

However, computers are not like humans. The time that computers sit idle is merely lost processing time. In recent years, computer scientists have seen this unutilized processing time as an opportunity. Even when I was at MIT back in the early 1990s, there were projects to tap into unutilized server processing cycles. This phenomenon of tapping into free processing cycles from a pool of computing resources has now been officially termed grid computing.

Early examples of grid computing included SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) and the mapping of the Humane Genome. Grid computing has a simple model. A parent computer breaks apart a problem into many sub-problems. It then checks to see where there is available processing cycles to process a piece of the problem. Once a child computer that can process a piece of the problem is identified, the master sends the piece of the problem to the child to process. Once the child is done processing the piece, it sends it back to the master who reassembles each of the …

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