Cloud, Grid, what's in a name?

I have been watching for a while the ever-broadening range of definitions for "cloud." My favorite is a recent piece that explains that Skype, BitTorrent, and SETI are all clouds. I now realize that a cloud can be whatever you want it to be, and that this is the best definition of the term, from dictionary.com:

cloud
11.    to make obscure or indistinct; confuse

That got me wondering whether the "grid" term has also subject to similar expansion over the years. To some extent, yes--I've read about discovery grids, knowledge grid, data grids, and too many others to count. But I do think there has been a fair bit of conceptual clarity, albeit with some expansion over time. Specifically:

1. The term was initially used to refer to on-demand computing (basically the Amazon cloud definition, but without the benefits of virtual machines) -- e.g., see the first edition of The Grid
2. Then it was broadened to include resource federation within distributed virtual organizations (what you need to enable distributed teams to achieve on-demand access to their federated resources) -- e.g., see The Anatomy of the Grid

Then there is the use of the term to mean "any sort of parallel computing" -- e.g., see Sun Grid Engine, Oracle 10-G, etc. But that is just marketing.

Having dissed the term, I should explain why we at Chicago/Argonne are using it. In brief, we see an opportunity to make connections with the extremely interesting developments in on-demand/utility/cloud computing that are emerging in industry.  Thus:

• Kate Keahey describes her work on Nimbus as a "cloud", to point out that her Globus virtual workspace service provides the same virtual machine provisioning capabilities that Amazon EC2 provides (and some), but in a package that you can run on your machines (if you so desire).
• We are holding a workshop on Cloud Computing and Applications in Chicago in October to help establish connections between those working on data-intensive science and thus developing tools and services for on-demand/utility/cloud computing.

Comments

[Dan Ciruli]

Fantastic post, and that's by far the best definition of "cloud" I've read so far. ;-)

Rich Wellner has spent a bunch of time on the Google Cloud Computing e-mail list trying to let people know that many of the issues that they're starting to wrestle with have already been wrestled.

It's not clear if the "cloud" community understands the state of "grid" or how it may affect how clouds develop; still, I'm glad folks like Rich are trying to share their knowledge.