The Realities of Grid Computing

For approximately one decade Grid [1] computing has been hailed by many as “the next big thing”. This chapter looks at two specific aspects of Grid computing, namely the issues involved in attracting new communities to the Grid and the realities of offering a worldwide production service using multiple Grid infrastructures. The first topic is relevant in terms of the cost benefits – or possibly drawbacks – of Grid computing compared with alternatives, whereas the second goes beyond the hype to examine what it takes to deploy commission and run a 24 ×7 production service at the “Petascale” – now increasingly used to refer to 105 (of today’s) cores.