n. A large collection of computers linked via the Internet so that their combined processing power can be harnessed to work on difficult or time-consuming problems.
2000
Instead of analyzing their data on one supercomputer, the Geneva scientists plan to use an Internet-linked network of computers all over the world, which they are calling a computational grid.
1997
It's a simple fact: The average office computer, even though it's powered up 100% of the time, sits idle most of the time.
Reading a Web page, typing a document or analyzing a spreadsheet is not very taxing for your average Pentium-based box. Wouldn't it be nice if you could pool all that horsepower and make it available as a shared network resource to power-hungry applications?
A group of researchers is working on a way to do just that, albeit on a grander scale. Re-searchers from the University of Southern California…demonstrated at Supercomputing 97 (SC97), in San Jose, Calif. last week, a computational grid that used about 3,000 processors in the U.S. and Europe.
The Globus Ubiquitous Supercomputing Testbed (GUSTO) is intended to show how a collection of computers can be strung together across a network to operate like a power grid supplying a neighborhood with electricity.
Reading a Web page, typing a document or analyzing a spreadsheet is not very taxing for your average Pentium-based box. Wouldn't it be nice if you could pool all that horsepower and make it available as a shared network resource to power-hungry applications?
A group of researchers is working on a way to do just that, albeit on a grander scale. Re-searchers from the University of Southern California…demonstrated at Supercomputing 97 (SC97), in San Jose, Calif. last week, a computational grid that used about 3,000 processors in the U.S. and Europe.
The Globus Ubiquitous Supercomputing Testbed (GUSTO) is intended to show how a collection of computers can be strung together across a network to operate like a power grid supplying a neighborhood with electricity.
1997 (earliest)
A computational grid is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides pervasive and dependable access to advanced computational resources. I've chosen the term grid as being analogous to that of an electrical power grid.