Grid Computing

The use of pools of resources onto which applications or services may be dynamically provisioned and re-provisioned to meet the goals of one or more enterprises, whilst improving both efficiency and agility. Grid computing environments may be typified by

• The use network distributed, shared pools of discrete resources to achieve greater performance, scaling, resilience and utilization
• Flexibility or mutability, as components are regularly repurposed or re-provisioned in line with the business goals for the services that run on them
• A focus on services, rather than on components, as grids turn networks into arbitrarily rich/complex fabrics of resources.
• Application or service architectures which are disaggregated or distributed in nature, for example Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and which leverage the properties of the fabric of resources.
• The consolidation of computing components into [typically] a smaller number of larger resource pools to enable easier provisioning and greater resource utilization.
• The standardization of components and/or their interfaces, configurations, processes and applications. Virtualization is an example of this.

A type of distributed computing in which a wide-ranging network connects multiple computers whose resources can then be shared by all end-users; includes what is often called "peer-to-peer" computing.

A type of distributed computing in which a wide-ranging network connects multiple computers whose resources can then be shared by all end users; includes what is often called peer-to-peer computing.

A computing architecture that provides computing resources using many computers acting as one virtual computing resource. On the client side, grid computing provides a pool of shared resources, allowing complete transparency as to where and how a task is performed. On the server side, grid computing enables enterprises to provision resources to respond to client requests. Grid computing environments are often typified by:

• Distributed, shared pools of resources to achieve greater performance, scaling, resilience, and utilization
• Flexibility, as components are regularly re-provisioned in line with business goals
• Application or service architectures, such as Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), which are disaggregated/distributed
• Consolidation into a smaller number of larger resource pools for easier provisioning and greater utilization
• Automation of day-to-day manual maintenance - software installation, patching, upgrading, workload balancing, etc.
• Standardization of components and/or their interfaces, configurations, processes, and applications (see "Virtualization").

presenting a group of similar computers to job submitters as a single computer image to allow either asynchronous scheduled execution of jobs on the first available system in the group, or to support execution of a individual jobs across multiple physical computers.

An emerging computing model where a large amount of geographically separated, networked computers work like one single abstract infrastructure, able to compute multiple, complex tasks in parallel, required by multiple customers at a time.