From a screensaver called SETI@Home to the international Grid is one of the potential futures of global computing. The internet brought us the potential of networking thousands of servers. It effectively gave everybody access to an enormous wealth of information that is being constantly updated. The downside being that not all of the data is accurate, sharable to all age groups or tasteful. Because of its size it has become impossible to police - so its strength (freedom for a person to publish whatever they desire) has also become its weakness.

So what is this Grid thing?

The SETI@Home screensaver used the unused processing power of the PC to look for intelligent life in space. The volunteers where given some distributed computing activities which were fed back to the SETI. During 2001 the 500,000 SETI PCs averaged 71 teraflops of computing power. The fastest IBM computer proudly performs at 12 teraflops compared with a PCs 2 gigaflops. If you can distribute the tasks and aggregate the processing power you get tremendous computing capabilities.

This is the basis of the Grid. Joining-up all the spare computing power to solve distributed problems. It is the true implementation of distributed processing and information sharing.

It cannot be used for all problems but will be important for solving any "number crunching" oriented problems and might be the only cost-effective way of addressing them.

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Lock up your computers the Grid is coming

Although the strength of Grid computing will be the next major step in the evolution of computing there are some considerations that must be understood.

Not all activities can take advantage of distributed computing.

To enable Grid to work it is necessary for the PCs to autonomously talk to each other. This chatter is required for them to agree what they are doing, how much resource they can make available and what data is required. To do this the PC will have to become part of the equivalent of the Borg.

As with the Borg the advantages of the Grid are the sharing of the knowledge and the assimilation of the resources. As a member of the Grid, its welfare will become more important than the individual.

So the Grid will be very useful for corporates with 1000's of company owned resources. They will be able to be directed to support the mission critical activities as part of a prioritised working environment. The security policies of the organisation will embrace the capabilities and enable the scheduling of jobs potentially across the globe with PCs being utilised when the users are not in the office.

What about the home user?

It is unlikely that users will release their computers to be used in a networked environment whilst they sleep or are at work. Security of the PC will have to develop before this will be possible. The asynchronous SETI@Home activities will continue and will evolve.

Commercial "Grid-like" products are being introduced by IBM and Sun. Generic Grid will take some time. Open standards will need to be developed and endorsed which might be its biggest challenge - MS is backing Hailstorm & .Net whilst the competitors are looking at Grid to stop MS dominance.

Until we see how Grid will evolve I recommend that you lock your personal computer away.