get gridden - Grid computing and Web Services

Leading the way on the open source front is the Globus Alliance - an organization whose most notable contribution to the cause has been a grid toolkit (GT4) that tightly weaves as many enabling standards as it possibly can -- many of which come from the Web services ecosystem -- into an open-source based solution for building grids. GT4 is to grids what an open source solution like Apache is to Web servers or what GNU Linux is to operating systems (even to the extent that both include implementations of well known standards).

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On the interoperable standards front, GT4 already has many standards baked into it. As more standards come to bear, particularly in the area of Web services, it's likely they'll be absorbed into the standard grid playbook. As it turns out, Web services and grid computing are virtually synonymous. Both compute paradigms subscribe to the idea that computing tasks can be serviced in utility-like fashion by distributed compute nodes that are discoverable and accessible through standard APIs -- the benefits of which are dynamically scalable and resilient systems that do away with over-provisioning as a method of dealing with peak loads.

from Gridless enterprises should be talking to the EGA