The end of Grid computing?

Guy Tel-Zur announces the end of grid computing, based on Google trends data for "grid computing" vs. "virtualization."

The data are fun, but I'm not convinced. Certainly the Google Trends data captures the fact that "virtualization" has replaced "grid computing" as the most popular industry buzzword. But given that industry has used "grid computing" mostly to mean "cluster computing" (e.g., Oracle 10-G, SGE), that doesn't say too much about grid per se.

Measuring adoption and impact is nevertheless an important goal. Thus we have integrated usage reporting mechanisms into our Globus software. We see continued growth in use, as captured by metrics such as service deployments. We're now trying to understand the underlying usage modalities. We believe that many are concerned with "eResearch" functions other than "federating computers"--e.g., on-demand access to computing [on HPC systems and/or EC2], data distribution, service publication and composition, etc. Do these functions count as "grid"? They do according to our article "The Anatomy of the Grid"--and if you look at the goals of projects such as D-Grid.

It would be interesting to see Google Trends data for just "grid." However, that word alone has too many different uses.

Comments

[Gabriel Mateescu]

Virtualization and Grid computing are
indeed related concepts, referring to
different levels of the virtualization
hierarchy.

Intel's Ravi Subramaniam calls them
"the Siamese twins of IT infrastructure"
in his presentation given at OGF 21
in Seattle,

http://www.ogf.org/OGF21/materials/972/The%20Siamese%20Twins%20of%20IT%20Infrastructure%20OGF_Ravi.pdf

As Ravi notes, virtualization refers
to server-level and storage-level
techniques such as aggregation,
encapsulation, delegation, and
partitioning, whereas Grids are
"system-level virtualizations" and
"infrastructures for managing workload
and infrastructure virtualizations".

[Sergey]

I think this is the "Terms War". Just look at http://cern.ch/hst/publications/DefiningTheGrid-1.1.pdf

We can also say "Information Technology" is better known rather "GRID computing". But these are incomparable terms. Because Inf.Tech is much wider term than GRID one.

But this is the vary "sad fact" and I also came across this fact at FP7 Project. Some said that GRID is dead and Service Oriented Approach "rules the world" According to FP7-ICT Objective 1.2. They haven't met the GRID as the keyword in this objective, so I've heard about GRID's Death. And this was really sad