Amazon.com
Beyond the Net, say Foster, Kesselman, and a host of impressive contributors, lies the Grid. While the Net allows users everywhere to share information, the Grid will allow users to share raw computing power. The goal is to put full supercomputing capabilities into the hands of anyone who needs it while providing for more efficient use of the supercomputers of tomorrow. The potential benefits to science, government, and business may well be beyond imagination.
Foster and Kesselman have gathered together essays, proposals, and ruminations of more than 30 distinguished stars of the high-speed computing and networking world in order to do four things: make the case for developing computational grids, provide ideas on how such grids may be designed, demonstrate how the grids might be used, and point out the research still needed to make it happen. While the book was written to serve as a possible textbook in advanced networking, it makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the future of network computing.
The text covers Grid applications, the programming tools required, the services that will be provided, and an examination of Grid infrastructure. Despite being the work of so many authors, the chapters are logically arranged so that the knowledge needed to understand one chapter is provided by those that precede it. --Elizabeth Lewis
Review
I am struck by the increased emphasis on applications---50% more pages and 4 times the number of chapters---than in the first edition. There is also more material on developing standards, policy, and management. These are true signs of a maturing technology. I hold firm that the Grid will have significant impact on more aspects and segments of IT than the designers originally conceived. The rich experiences in this book will convince the reader as well -Shane Robison, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy & Technology Officer, Hewlett-Packard The "doing of science" s at an inflection point: Computation, collaboration, visualization and smart storage lie at the heart of what science in the 21st century requires. This extremely readable collection provides a detailed roadmap for creating a global platform that enables this transformation. Most fascinating, to me, is how the Grid creates a technical artifact around which the social practices of science will evolve. Cultures form around artifacts,which is why this book is so important. -John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist of Xerox and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), co-author of The Social Life of Information, HBSP 2000 The Grid, 2nd Edition, extends a vision and agenda for another decade. The Grid and web services technologies are enabling pioneering, distributed applications that begin to fulfil the vision. Eventually we"ll look back on the resulting standardization for interoperation as the real revolution. The standards and discipline will enable a new form of software construction, delivery, and even restructure the software industry. -Gordon Bell, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Foster and Kesselman have done a great job in documenting the promises and challenges of GRIDs as they evolve from their distributed computing roots to support the virtualization of applications. -Robert Aiken, Director of Engineering Academic Research and Technology Initiatives (ARTI), Cisco Systems Inc. Do you want to understand why the computer, as we know it today, will become obsolete? If yes, put your money down, and buy this book. I congratulate the authors. -Philip Emeagwali, Scientist and "A Father of the Internet" Since the first edition of this book, the Grid has evolved from vision to reality: it has become a computing and data management infrastructure that is widely used in science and engineering, has a strong industrial support and has a large community of developers and users. The two editors of this book, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, played a leading role in this transformation. This new edition of The Grid reflects this change. Like the original edition, it is likely to become the one essential reference about the Grid, as well as an excellent introduction to the technologies that are used in the Grid infrastructure. -Marc Snir, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign For proponents of Grid computing and for the IT community that seeks to apply these ideas, this book will serve as a first class tour of the concept space and the details of its implementation. Guaranteed to be thought provoking and an excellent source of information. -Vint Cerf, Internet Pioneer
