Distributed Thinking

In my work with the Grid Computing Now! Knowledge Transfer Network, I talk about "virtualisation" and "service-oriented architecture" just as much as "grid" itself. People sometimes ask what is the difference between these concepts. My first answer is perhaps rather glib - I say that I don't care as long as the technology gets the job done. Although this is not a straight answer, those of us on the GCN! team believe it is important to put the business answers before any notion of technological purity. But if we turn to the question as stated, I think that as long as a solution includes the key concepts of virtualised resources and dynamic allocation of applications across those resource, then that to me is enough to call the system a grid. But, of course, we can go further. A recent conversation reminded me of the important point that distributed systems typically have to manage failure. As systems scale to many machines and many sites, then some...