Thursday, November 19, 2009

Grid and Cloud Computing

Today, at every conference their is atleast one talk about the recent cloud computing. Companies present their products that runs on Cloud, other companies presented their own Cloud architecture.
Some of the popular cloud service provider are
  1. Amazon

  2. Microsoft

  3. Google

This week Microsoft offered it cloud service named "Windows Azure" at it PDC which would be released in January 2010 and in Feburary 2010 will be full flede available to customers.

There is also a buzz about Grid computing and how it differs from cloud computing. As understood,
  • Grid computing is pooling the available resource and forming a group of loosely couple resources.

  • Cloud computing is also a pool of resources which is provided to the user for achieving their task.

However, both of this computing technique differ in the way it service its users. In grid computing, a single grid consist of set of nodes inter-connected to each other in loosely coupled fashion. User submits the task to the gird which break the task into sub-tasks and execute it on individual nodes in grid. After the computation is over, the result is returned back to the user. It can be called as Parallel Job processing technique.


In cloud computing user submit the job to the cloud. The cloud is formed with set of loosely coupled servers. But, unlike Grid computing, the task submitted by user to the cloud is executed on single server. This means, set of tasks submitted by different users are computed on any one of the server in the cloud.

The GRID and CLOUD computing also are called as "UTILITY Computing".