A range of grid-related questions

　　What is a grid?

　　All or some of a group of computers, servers and storage across an enterprise, virtualized as one large computing system. Because grids unleash latent power that, at any one time, is not being used, they can give companies a huge gain in power, speed and collaboration, radically accelerating compute-intensive processes. Cost, meanwhile, can remain low, as grids can be built using existing infrastructure, helping to ensure optimal utilization of computing capabilities.

What effect does grid have on users whose machines are being utilized for processing?

　　Grids are designed to be seamless and transparent . A user whose desktop PC, say, is contributing processing power to the grid will experience no negative effects: the grid runs in the background, utilizing available resources when needed by the system. If the PC user decides to run an application that requires more processing power, the work currently being processed on that machine will be dynamically reallocated to another machine in the grid with available processing power.

Is grid computing available today — or is it more of a future statement?

　　Grid computing is used today by many companies across a number of industries. Current IBM customer references for grid include Butterfly.net, a development studio, online publisher and infrastructure provider for massively multiplayer games that connect players on PC's, consoles and mobile devices. Butterfly Grid consists of two clusters of approximately 50 IBM ? xSeries? servers running in IBM hosting facilities. Specialized game servers and database servers are fully meshed over high-speed fiber-optic lines, enabling transparent routing of players to different servers in the grid. Another current reference for IBM Grid Computing is the University of Pennsylvania's groundbreaking National Digital Mammography Archive, which gives rapid retrieval of digital patient files from multiple locations in a secure environment. The University of Pennsylvania Grid manages this huge data volume, schedules traffic and encrypts all image and information transmission using portal systems running almost exclusively on IBM hardware — including sixteen distributed IBM Netfinity servers running Linux and Windows 2000.

What industries are using grid computing now?

　　Some examples include: Automotive and aerospace, for collaborative design and data-intensive testing; financial services, for running long, complex scenarios and arriving at more accurate decisions; life sciences, for analyzing and decoding strings of biological and chemical information; government, for enabling seamless collaboration and agility in both civil and military departments and agencies; higher education for enabling advanced, data and compute intensive research.

What are the possible benefits of a grid deployment?

　　Benefits can be extensive. They include:

　　· Accelerated time to results, which allows for the provisioning of extra time and resources to solve problems that were previously unsolvable

· Improved productivity and collaboration

· Allowing widely dispersed departments and businesses to create virtual organizations to share data and resources

· More flexible, resilient operational infrastructures

· Instantaneous access to compute and data resources to "sense and respond" to needs

· Leveraging existing capital investments, which helps to ensure optimal utilization of computing capabilities

· Avoiding common pitfalls of over-provisioning and incurring excess costs

· Freeing IT organizations from the burden of administering disparate, non-integrated systems

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