Talk:Grid computing

message: In the first paragraph, the text says : "as well as a form of network-distributed parallel processing"
This later assertion is quite frivolous... Although it is considered as a form of distributed computing (which is ALWAYS networked btw else it doesn't exist - saying "networked-distributed ..." is a pleonasm), Grid computing has nothing to do with parallelism, there's no notion of process scheduling, topology design or whatsoever from a software designer/engineer stand point, and does not require any parallel programming language syntax/compiler... Compare Beckerley's Parallel C compiler with traditional C compilers and you'll see the difference, it's spectacular. The later compilers can map parallelism over rings, grids, hypercubes, n-cubes, or any other forms of topologies, however these topologies must be taken into account by the software designer/developer via specific language syntax/instructions: it relies on the fact that multiple CPUs are physically part of the same machine, hence with a much more deterministic approach towards very high performances and availability, thus the existence of parallel compilers.
Here, "Distributed parallelism" is an oxymoron: either it's distributed, either it's parallel, but not both. Yes, one could "distribute" an application designed for a parallel computer, but this type of integration (which I've never seen) is completely irrelevant in defining grid or cloud networking. One could end up with grids of parallel computers if need be, but both technologies are very distinct.
Even though they target the same goal which is performance, by coupling the power of multiple CPUs, comparing distributed computing with parallel computing is a TRAP, where such a comparison can confuse or mislead the reader. Distributed computing could be considered as a cheaper alternative for parallelism, but at the same level as considering one single pipelined multi-threaded SIMD or multi-core MIMD CPUs as alternatives to parallel computing: in both cases, performance is the goal, but it's not parallelism (which will always outperform Distributed Computing given the same number of CPUs).
To vulgarize: one could consider Parallel Computing like brain cells in the same head (number of cells, synaptic connections and underlying structure), whereas Distributed Computing (thus including Grid Computing) can be compared to managing the work amongst a number of those "heads" like project-human-resource management (however each "head" has at most 1-2 "brain cells" - or CPUs - in average, usually it doesn't involve parallel computers), for targeting an optimal dead line.
--HawkFest (talk) 19:46, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: There are different interpretations of what means "distributed" and what means "parallel", even the experts diverge in their definitions. In general, everybody seems to agree that "distributed" refers to a system that makes use of more than one processing unit. Different processing units may be distributed within the same rack (like e.g. in cluster computing), or over the network. In the grid case, distribution over the network is the key part of the paradigm, so the word "network" is important. Parallel processing, also in general, refers to solution of a computational task using several procesing units. Parallel processing can be done in a distributed computing environment, or in a mainframe (the latter is often more efficient). Parallel processing can be performed in a grid environment, however, it is not a part of the definition of the grid. That is, grid computing may well be used to process totally independent tasks - and is actually better suited for this, as independent tasks do not depend on network-indiced latency. For latency-tolerant parallel tasks, grid computing is as suitable as any other form of distributed computing. In short, I am not sure how can the article be improved. oxana (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 15:34, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  NOT parallelism, don't confuse the reader. 

message: Is this the same as distributed computing or is it something else?  -- Evercat 10:58 May 1, 2003 (UTC)
:It is a specific example of a distributed system in the same way a heart bypass is a specific example of surgery. To borrow from the Perl developers - there is more than one way to do things. Grid computing is a specific example of a distributed system where there are a number of different organisations with different policies working together for a common purpose.[GG]
::Then why the article state that "grid computing is a super set of distributed computing"? Does it mean to say it's a superb subset of distributed computing? LX 15:51, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, since nobody chose to chime in for 20 days, I decided to be bold and change "super set" to "subset". If this is wrong, please speak up. --LX 13:17, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Just my 2 cents to say that you are right, it's a subset: grid computing is like distributed computing mapped over a quadrilateral mesh of networked computers. It could be called "Mesh Computing" if one wishes. The differences lies in the topology: grid computing is Distributed Computing over a matrix of computers, Cloud Computing is another form of distributed computing where nodes are more loosely coupled, you could also have distributed computing involving rings or bus of computer networks, etc, and these topologies can be virtually assigned via some middleware... --HawkFest (talk) 20:12, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Same as distributed computing?

message: The article adresses only one specific use case of grid computing: collection compute power for big problems.
Please see e.g. the OGSA-Use-cases, and you will see that this is only one of many, many use cases.
You will find the document GFD.29, 'Open Grid Services Architecture Use Cases' on https://forge.gridforum.org/ .
Beside the OGSA Use-cases, there are many more use cases around which are even much more general, but they rise the question what a grid is.
:I absolutely agree: idly cycle harvesting covers only a small part of grid use cases!  Condor was originally created for that, in a single administrative domain, and was later 'gridified', and XXX@home like projects also aim at cpy cycle harvesting.  However, globus as the main grid middleware, and basically NO work in GGF is aiming at that.  The main focus really is the spanning of administrative domains for distributed problems.  Everything else just derives from that.  For example, basically all data related problems in GGF arise from the fact that name spaces, meta data, and data belong to different admin domains, in terms of schema, ownership, security, etc. Andre
------
:treated as a virtual cluster embedded in a distributed telecommunications infrastructure.
That surely is a candidate for language that makes science and technology articles harder to understand than they need be! call a bilateral trenching tool a spade! -- Tarquin 08:47, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. This article disappears up its own I/O port sometimes and needs clarity. I also agree that the "CPU-cycles sharing" argument is overstated in the modern context. Dizzley (Peter H) 11:07, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: rubbish - for anything outside the limited confines of the user desktop, cpu cycle sharing / access is a major issue for computational science, HPC, financial services ... ad infinitum. And the sentence does make sense. [GG]
Yes it makes sense.... but I often find myself telling non-geeks about grid computing in the hope they'll try something like SETI@home or a similar project. What should I direct them to for a simple introduction? Certainly not this article as it stands! The opening few paragraphs need to be non-technical. Something that my grandmother could feasibly grasp :) -- Tarquin 15:39, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grid is more than sharing CPU-Cycles for big problems 

message: * A couple of other things that could be mentiond in this article is:
** The type of problems best addressed by this computing paradigm (paradigm = 20 cents??:)) - that being highly parallelizable as opposed to serial computations.
** How result integrity is preserved (i.e. tampering is prevented)
** The economics involved, and also individual CPU owners' rights to results.
:::--Cheese Sandwich 20:59, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: My 40 cents: grid computing has nothing to do with parallelism, there's no notion of process scheduling or whatsoever from a software designer/engineer stand point, and does not require any parallel programming syntax/compiler/... Compare Beckerley's Parallel C compiler with traditional C compilers and you'll see the difference, it's spectacular... You could even have grids of parallel computers if one wishes: both technologies are very distinct, and comparing them is a TRAP, where such a comparison can confuse or mislead the reader. --HawkFest (talk) 18:50, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Suggestions for additional info

message: How reliable is grid computing?  What if one of the computers had faulty hardware (memory, CPU etc), would that cause problems?
* Faulty hardware would result in results not being returned. Depending on the specific grid, the work would probably be re-sent to another machine. So, you'd get the same effect as if the machine had accepted work, been shut down, and so never returned a result. Some grids periodically "ping" their nodes to verify that they (1) still exist, and (2) are working on the last problem sent them. These grids would quickly detect and compensate for a faulty machine.
* It actually pretty common that faulty computers (bad RAM or overheating processors) can continue to operate with very few observable operational flaws.  Usually this results in subtle computational errors due to bits getting randomly flipped by the hardware.  (Of course sometimes a critical bit that affects a memory pointer gets flipped, which will cause the process to segfault/coredump/access-violate or sometimes the entire OS to panic/bluescreen.)  For more reliable results, you can run the same workunit on more than one computer and compare the numerical outcomes.  If the two results do not match within tolerances, then one of the computers may have been faulty and you need to run the result again until you're confident. -- Bovineone 03:02, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Reliability?

message: Globus is certainly widely used, but i'm not sure you can claim its the de-facto middleware solution. Rather, its is a _toolkit_ of which many components are used widely. Overall, given the nature of middleware, describing them as single applications as it were, is misleading. Each is made of many components which can be seperately installed. I removed the claim the Globus was the 'core middleware' for European Grids.
Too bad that was removed.  Globus is more than just a toolkit.  It is also a suite of services that, without any additional programming, provide a complete grid solution for many classes of deployment. --Rw2 20:51, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Done, now Globus toolkit is its own article. ora 08:25, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Globus claims

message: I've seen grids running on everything from occassionally-connected laptop 'clusters', through to racks of servers.  And, I heard rumours of grid-style applications being developed on configurable CPUs (FPGAs and GPUs, ?) with tremendous performance gains possible.  Does anyone know more about the later?  --Richard@lbrc.org 09:50, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Grid Hardware

message: So nurg just did a good copyedit, but he changed all instances of Grid to grid. Personally I use a capitalised version (i work on a Grid project) as i find it distinguished it from a geometric grid. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions. In the Grid field i find both used depending on the organisation, and don't consider grid inherently more accurate than Grid. ora 12:47, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Is it a proper noun? It doesn't appear so to me. Nurg 03:13, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Spelling

message: So i think this article is due a bit of an overhaul. It has good information but in a pretty strange order as it has grown fairly organically, and 'state of the art 2005' is a bit out of date now we are well into 2006. I'd be happy to have a go but i wanted to see if there were any objections first as i think the article will look pretty difefrent afterwards. I will come up with a revised order first and post it here before i go ahead though.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by ora (talk • contribs) 
:At minimum, I think the current sections "The Global Grid Forum", "The Globus Alliance", and "Commercial grid computing offerings" could be put together as subsections in a new section entitled "Organizations and corporate supporters" or something.  Additionally, the entire "Conceptual framework" section needs to be moved to be earlier in the article (before the organizations).  Maybe something like the below...  (free free to edit it) -- Bovineone 00:07, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree. Go for it. I can't understand how this got to be designated a "good article". The opening sentence is awful. Just mind the capitalisation ;-) see my earlier comment. Nurg 03:20, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I've begun playing with a new ToC based on Bovineone's list above, its on the subpage. ora 17:10, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  It looks like a good start, with a much greater emphasis on sections with content.  I'm also confused as to how this page could have been nominated as "good", especially with the last 50% of the current page pretty much just being links and not actually useful text. -- Bovineone 14:07, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sure this should not be a "good article" and we can do something about that. I would not waste too much time rewriting the whole article on a sub-page, once a new structure has emerged I think you can apply it, then fix each section on a section by section basis. I'm not sure that the first section should be "origins" - starting with "what is grid computing" then going on to origins makes more sense to me. And a good quote for the lack of a clear definition of "grid" can be found in Ian Foster's "What is the Grid? A Three Point Checklist". Just after the first heading he says "We read about Compute Grids, Data Grids, Science Grids, Access Grids... is there more to a Grid than, as one wag put it, a 'funding concept'". Moving from this onto Foster's three point list would make sense, and we could follow that up with other peoples definitions. Andreww 17:55, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Reorganisation

message: That's a lot of external links... Surely some of them should be removed. See WP:EL for the policy. I would try to remove some, but I'm not too familiar with Grid computing. Gflores Talk 05:12, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: external links

message: Sorry about the use of the text from the page; didn't realize that went against policy. I've re-added the text I wrote (and left out the text from the page as well as the banner, of course.) FlyByPC 19:37, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  SETI@home 

message: If you want to join a team for SETI@home, have a look at the Wikipedia team! --80.229.152.246 16:04, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Wow, what about this team too? Greudin (discuss.) 09:57, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  SETI@home Wikipedia Team 

message: The current text indicates that SETI@home is unique in that it 
uses coherent integration, but all modern microwave and some 
optical SETI searches, use both coherent and non-coherent
integration.
Coherent here really just means the use of discrete Fourier
transforms, rather than simply averaging the power.  The link on
coherent integration is also misleading as the connection 
between optical coherence and coherent integration is rather
tenuous, although optical coherence is a prerequisite for signals
to be detected by coherent integration.
In SETI@home, the gaussian search is effectively non-coherent 
integration and the pulse search certainly uses non-coherent 
integration.
What's really unique is the number of chirp rates tried, and,
in later versions, the search for repeating pulses.
David Woolley 13:11, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  What makes SETI@home's SETI different? 

message: Be afraid, be very afraid!
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-112005.html#00000724
http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/SETI/SETI_Hacker.htm  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.70.48.242 (talk • contribs) 
: For a counter argument see http://www.setileague.org/articles/hacker.pdf
: Also note that a resistor connected to the antenna input will, given long enough cover all possible input patterns (I think it will cover 90% within about an order of magnitude of the time to enumerate them systematically).  --David Woolley 08:59, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Honestly that has to be one of the most farfetched things I've ever heard. —Aiden 04:42, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  L33t hax0r alienz are set to take over the Earth via SETI! 

message: I propose to change the referencing style from inline URLs, plus full citation in References, to using Harvard style references inline (with the same full citations).  The advantage of this is that it is easier to see which facts come from which sources, which helps in maintaining the sources and means that it is easier for a reader to  judge the reliability of statements against their perception of the reliabilty of particular sources.
Note that the article is generally under sourced at the moment (a common problem on Wikipedia).
Up to yesterday, I believe that I was the only person to have contributed inline references, so I could have made the change unilaterally.  A couple of references have now been added inline in the direct URL style, but have not yet been properly cited in the References section.  See, for example, WP:V and WP:CITE for why full citations are desirable, although it is also worth noting that Berkeley has a real problem with link rot and renaming URLs.  --David Woolley 09:11, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Propose change to Harvard referencing 

message: On February 11, JarlaxleArtemis added a section about "s-23 wiki",
: a MediaWiki-based wiki created by the Seti23 cabal. It is described as a "non-hierarchical geek contents dis-organization by uncensored, decentralized, transglobal multi-user hypertext editing without restrictions." It is both an English- and German-language wiki.
: The Seti23 is a team dedicated to Karl Koch and is participating in the SETI@home project.
I removed the section.  There are thousands of SETI@home teams; this team does not appear to be any more notable than any other team.  Note that s-23 wiki used to have its own article, but it was deleted. dbenbenn | talk 10:32, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  s-23 wiki 

message: The article states that "Grid purists point out that Seti@home is really a distributed computing application as it does not make use of almost any Grid concepts." (Note that SETI is capitalised in the SETI@home article, whereas this article is inconsistent in its usage.)
About the only attempts to distinguish the concepts of grid computing and distributed computing that I have found in this article or in distributed computing are two separate and inconspicuous sentences in this one. Firstly: "Grid computing's focus on the ability to support computation across administrative domains sets it apart from ... traditional distributed computing." Secondly: "One characteristic that currently distinguishes grid computing from distributed computing is the abstraction of a 'distributed resource' into a grid resource." (Currently? Has this changed? Is it expected to?) It is not immediately apparent to me, even after reading this article and the SETI@home article how the project fails to meet these criteria, as these unnamed "purists" claim.
As a general comment, there appears to be a great deal of confusion with respect to the relationship between grid and distributed computing (and, to a lesser extent, clustered computing). It would appear that a definition by delimitation and relation is called for in the introductory definitions in this article and in distributed computing.
LX 16:07, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Kind of. I work in Grids, and I see endless disgreement about what Grids are. I have also met the guy who wrote seti@home, and according to him it is not a grid (either the 'classic' or BOINC versions. A friend of mine is studying the emergence of Grid technology froma social/community standpoint, and sugegsts that the definition is currently as fluid as the technology, making blanket statements for any single project as beig a Grid or not fairly hard to justify. ora 14:14, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm not arguing about what grids are or whether SETI@home meets a particular definition: I don't know enough about either to do that. What I am saying is that even a superficial understanding of BOINC (at the level of installing optimized clients, and writing app_info files, say) makes it obvious that the article's assertion that SETI@home is monolithic is flat-out wrong. Secondly, the definition of a grid which the article proffers seems to me to admit BOINC (maybe even to the extent of BOINC being an exemplar of the definition used), but the article proceeds to explicitly exclude SETI@home, which can't be right -- EmmetCaulfield 19:20, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  SETI@home "not a grid project" 

message: Having said that "SETI@home is not a grid project", the article then goes on to say, In a Grid, only the code required for retrieving work and returning results persists on the nodes. Code required to perform the distributed work is sent to the nodes separately. In this way, the nodes of a Grid can be easily reprogrammed.
This is an absolutely perfect description of (my understanding of) the BOINC framework, upon which SETI@home is built!
Consequently, the preceding assertion, "SETI@home's screensaver contains both code to process radio telescope data and code to handle retrieving work and returning results. The two bodies of code are intertwined into a single program.", is just plain wrong.
Indeed, the arrant nonsense of this assertion can clearly be seen in the fact that SETI@home can be run on Linux/UNIX without any graphics capability at all (I run the clients like this myself). Not alone is the infrastructure/management/network client (BOINC) separate from the project client (SETI@home, Predictor@home, climateprediction.net, ...), but the screensaver, if any, is a separate component again.
-- EmmetCaulfield 07:54, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Kind of. I work in Grids, and I see endless disgreement about what Grids are. I have also met the guy who wrote seti@home, and according to him it is not a grid (either the 'classic' or BOINC versions. A friend of mine is studying the emergence of Grid technology froma social/community standpoint, and sugegsts that the definition is currently as fluid as the technology, making blanket statements for any single project as beig a Grid or not fairly hard to justify. ora 14:14, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm not arguing about what grids are or whether SETI@home meets a particular definition: I don't know enough about either to do that. What I am saying is that even a superficial understanding of BOINC (at the level of installing optimized clients, and writing app_info files, say) makes it obvious that the article's assertion that SETI@home is monolithic is flat-out wrong. Secondly, the definition of a grid which the article proffers seems to me to admit BOINC (maybe even to the extent of BOINC being an exemplar of the definition used), but the article proceeds to explicitly exclude SETI@home, which can't be right -- EmmetCaulfield 19:20, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quite Wrong About SETI@home 

message: As far as I can see the following added nothing to the article and, I think, constituted spam. I have removed it to here as it may be possible to turn this list into a sensible paragraph. Andreww 17:27, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spam 

message: The links in the section Common features are a bit confusing: "Computational Grids" is just a forward to the top page, the "Data Grids" link leads to an empty page (although there is a page named Data Grid), and the Equipment Grids link is dead, too. As a sidenote, I would be very interested in the source of this taxonomy: Are there any papers I can reference? 
--89.57.183.10 08:35, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Computational, Data and Equipment Grids

message: Much of this article is dedicated to lauding how amazing this grid thing is, and there's a whole section advertising various organizations, that's just ridiculous, there is no way this is a Good Article, delete the ads and change the language to neutral as per WP:NPOV. Homestarmy 13:53, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Delisted GA

message: I was reading through the article and thought that
This technology was mostly abandoned in the 1980s as the administrative and security issues involved in having machines you did not control do your computation were (and are still by some) seen as insurmountable.
''
was badly worded and could be replaced with
This technology was mostly abandoned in the 1980s, mainly because of the administrative and security issues that arise from distributing data to foreign machines. Data procured in this way could be seen as being potentially erronous. (data consitency cannot be verified from an uncertified source).
and possibly (sorry im just editing as i read, and i may remove this after ive read the article) could include (I've just made this up, but if somebody verify it) something about the theoretical expodential reliability of data as relative to the number of sources... (i guess thats the old 'good vs evil' debate)
Im no expert, if somebody can ratify/expand then commit it.
Also, 'The grid has more potential than the general public believes' stands to be inacurate as the public at large don't know what the grid is, and the ones that do probably heard about it because of its potential.
: Someone seems to have squelched all that text anyway. Just as well, since it saved me a job; as I understand it, things were abandoned in the '80s because it was found hard to tackle the policy issues (still hard now!) and security really wasn't there at the time. It's probably the various efforts that lead to (and pushed forward) the Web that allowed these things to start again. No citable proof of that though. Donal Fellows 14:55, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Newbee suggestion

message: This article fails to mention Metacomputing, which is (in its modern incarnation) basically the same thing as Grid. The biggest initial competitor to Globus, Legion, isn't mentioned at all. FYI, the way I remember it, NASA's Information Power Grid pre-dated Globus' use of the term Grid. Greg 06:10, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds fuzzy to me, but I added a "see also" link. -- Beland 04:22, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Metacomputing

message: This article is good.  Can someone please offer their services to make the Utility computing good as well, even if that means merging with this one?  
--GreatTurtle 02:55, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I just did a major cleanup of that article, but I'm not an expert, and it could really use some references and broader historical perspective.  I think the two concepts are probably different enough to merit two different articles, but the utility computing one needs to go into a lot more detail. There are several angles which I've only hinted at in my rewrite. -- Beland 03:27, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please help on [[Utility computing]] Article. 

message: I forgot to note in my edit summary that I merged CPU scavenging when I did the partial rewrite. -- Beland 02:51, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent rewrite also a merge 

message: By way of cleaning up the Definitions sections, I think these are appropriate as references for the intro (which presents a summary of common definitions), but too verbose to present in detail to readers. -- Beland 05:03, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definitions 

message: This article is out of date. It represents grid computing as it was circa 2002 or so, when grids were still used predominantly for academic and high-performance computing (HPC) applications such as digital animation and special effects, oil and gas exploration, etc. 
In the last 5 years, however, grids have moved into the mainstream of computing. Companies like Oracle, IBM and BEA have introduced grid-enabled versions of major mainstream products, including Oracle 10g (relational database) and IBM WebSphere (J2EE middleware). Numerous startups, including DataSynapse, Appistry, Digipede and ActiveGrid have developed new application middleware for grids. Others, like ExaGrid and Amazon, have built grid -based architectures for scaling storage. 
Perhaps more important is the fact that utility computing is rapidly moving mainstream, and all serious projects in this area are based in one way or another on grid architectures. Amazon Web Services  has been on the market for a year with their S3/EC2 offering. Microsoft recently released the first details of their upcoming Cloud OS. Ebay has announced "Project eBox". Finally, 3Tera has been shipping for a year a grid operating system called AppLogic, which runs and scales mainstream web applications on grids.
All of this is great news, since it shows that grids are finally moving mainstream. Indeed, the opinion that grids are the next major computing architecture, with utility computing being it's killer app, is rapidly gaining momentum in the industry. Naturally, the fact that dozens of teams at different companies are working in parallel to advance the technology also means that there is a great deal of confusion on terminology and concepts, as every team introduces their own by necessity.   
Nevertheless, one thing is clear: grid computing is out of the academia, and in the mainstream of computing. We need a comprehensive rewrite of this article to reflect today's state of the technology, architectures, applications and challenges.
As a professional working in this area (I am one of the founders of 3Tera, mentioned above), I have the obvious motivation to invest significant effort in this work. I am also a former physicist who have spent a few years in academia, so I know the difference between original research, review articles and marketing :-). This is a significant undertaking, so I will need help with editing, checking sources, etc., and, of course, with keeping me honest :-)
I would like to hear thoughts from the community here before I embark on this refresh. Maverick61 21:32, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am a physicist, mostly from academia but with some commercial experience. I have been working on AstroGrid-D for a year and a half now. I still find grid concepts and the grid landscape confusing and would welcome an opportunity and excuse to get my head straight. I will support you in any way I can. --Art Carlson 08:15, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article requires a massive refresh 

message: I propose changing the first bullet point in the article to: 
"a collection of independent computers and local clusters combined into a unified computing infrastructure"
Jwozniak 20:08, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relationship to Cluster Computing 

message: I recently sorted the "See also" lists according to blue links, red links, and external links. Donal Fellows pointed out to me that the sorting before was (nearly) alphabetic, which is arguably better. I was confused partly because the alphabetical order had deteriorated somewhat, but I was actually motivated by the recent addition of a commercial link. I was bothered that that might be spam, but I could not easily what the other links were about, especially since the wiki links were indistinguishable from the external links. In the end I removed the three dot.com links, but I also question whether it is useful to have so many red links, or indeed any at all under "See also". I still maintain that a cleanup of the lists is in order, but I certainly don't insist that my way is best. Other opinions? --Art Carlson 15:24, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: While you're at it, consider further improving the organization of these lists by introducing a new, separate subheading under External links for "Commercial grid offerings". These references are currently scattered between See also, Software implementations and middleware and External links, Portals and Grid Projects, two overly large headings neither of which seems particularly coherent or appropriate. - JCLately 16:05, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I completely overlooked the "External links" section because I expected the "References" to be the last section. We need some large scale reorganization here. If you ask me, the number of links in this article is way out of proportion to the actual content. --Art Carlson 16:18, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, though it's a difficult problem to remedy. I've been toying with the idea of doing some work on this article, but haven't yet had the time to take a crack at it. My suggested reorganization would be a small step in the right direction, I think. Unfortunately, that's just the easy part. - JCLately 16:53, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sorting of lists 

message: Rereading this page, I see that most of the text in it seems to be defining a Grid as doing things like cycle scavenging and stuff like that. That's not what a Grid is about! More traditional supercomputers and Beowulf clusters also fit into the general Grid model, and the interesting use-cases involve coördination of these different resources to solve a problem. For example, using a cycle-scavenging system to check a large set of molecules for whether they look likely to bind to some target protein, and then using HPC to examine in detail the cases that look at least not impossible after the initial scan. (Doing such things often requires resources spread across more than one organization — requiring non-trivial security — and very careful control over QoS so that the coördination works at all...) To my mind, cycle scavenging is just how you build a particular class of (cheap, low interconnect capability, variable availability) cluster. But then I think my view of this is pretty much what Foster and Kesselman's original vision involved. (Grid computing is probably the same as Cloud Computing, and is closely related to SOA.) Donal Fellows (talk) 23:34, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition of "Grid" 

message: CORBA is important for distributed computing in general, but, AFAIK, no Grid middleware is using CORBA at the moment.  I thus removed it from the list of Grid APIs.  IMHO, Corba is lakking the scalability (mostly in terms of administration/coordination) to be useful for Grid systems.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Andremerzky (talk • contribs) 10:39, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed CORBA 

message: ABC@home used to be fast, http://web.archive.org/web/20120520163950/http://boincstats.com/en/stats/41/project/detail should it be added with "as of May 2012"? The numbers I found (might find even higher for this project or another) than the just updated BIONIC and Folding@home I just updated. This would be kind of misleading since the numbers are way lower now (and have been for a while?). Also It's not clear to me if this (or comments like these on talk pages) should go at the top (seems to be almost in that order here). Comp.arch (talk) 11:58, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should previously fast virtual supercomputers be added? 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Grid computing. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20140623054613/http://www.grid.org/stats/ to http://www.grid.org/stats/
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers. —cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 08:06, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified  on Grid computing. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/totals.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 06:15, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 6 external links on Grid computing. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20091216124323/http://gridportal.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/rtm/ to http://gridportal.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/rtm/
*Added archive https://www.webcitation.org/65X4DnfPV?url=http://www.ctonet.org/documents/GridComputing_analysis.pdf to http://www.ctonet.org/documents/GridComputing_analysis.pdf
*Added archive https://www.webcitation.org/65X4ERe8Q?url=http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp3613.html to http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp3613.html
*Added archive https://www.webcitation.org/65X4Gbge2?url=http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246100.html?Open to http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246100.html?Open
*Added archive https://www.webcitation.org/65X4IvVhu?url=http://archive.gria.org/docs/experiences%20with%20gria%20paper.pdf to http://www.gria.org/docs/experiences%20with%20gria%20paper.pdf
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070107034557/http://hst.web.cern.ch/hst/publications/DefiningTheGrid-1.1.pdf to http://hst.web.cern.ch/hst/publications/DefiningTheGrid-1.1.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 05:55, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: An IP has alleged a potential problem. I removed their comment and replaced it with a maintenance tag. Ifnord (talk) 21:36, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Moreover IOSRJournals is a predatory publisher, not a reliable source - Arjayay (talk) 10:21, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

text: I compared current article against http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jce/papers/Vol16-issue3/Version-4/C016341019.pdf and found no significant three-word copied phrases. The anonymous edit that added the IOSR link said the page essentially copied the whole paper. In my opinion, it did not and does not. OldNorthCounty (talk) 05:51, 22 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Close paraphrasing? 

message: Heterogeneous computing and grid computing appear to be functionally indistinguishable. Ethanpet113 (talk) 23:13, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Are there any reliable sources that describe them as synonyms? Jarble (talk) 18:26, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merge of [[Heterogeneous computing]] into [[Grid computing]]