Grid computing is a distributed computing system where a group of computers are connected to create and work as one large virtual computing power, storage, database, application, and service.
Grid computing allows a group of computers to share the system securely and optimizes their collective resources to meet required workloads by using open standards.
Major vendors have their own definition of the grid computing. Here are links to their websites on the grid computing:
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IBM
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HP
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Sun Microsystems
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Oracle
The history of grid computing dates back to the early 1990's when scientists and researchers studied the possibility of various types of distributed computing.
The word grid has its origin in the power grid system where a number of power generation plants and transmission network are connected to supply stable electric power to households and firms. The electric power is optimized to be distributed through the power grid,
so that any users can utilize it whenever they want without knowing where the electric power is coming from.
Grid computing was at first put to practical use in either scientific or academic fields. Today's big sciences such as life science require enormous amount of transactions, calculations and data analysis that can be only completed by huge computing power and resources. Sometimes it takes years even for supercomputers to accomplish these calculations.
In this way, grid technology comes to attract these advanced fields as a better alternative of supercomputers.
According to sources such as Sun Microsystems, many early adopters are found in such fields already using the grid technology as follows:
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CERN DataGrid
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NASA Information Power Grid / IPG
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SETI@Home / Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
• UK National Grid
• National Digital Mammographic Achieve
• The TeraGrid
• APGrid in Asia and the Pacific Rim
• NSF NCSA National Technology Grid
• DoD Distance Computing and Distributed Computing Grid
• Nimrod for campus-wide resource sharing
