Grid Computing means applying the resources of a lot of computers in a network simultaneously to a one problem for solving a scientific or a technical problem that needs a large number of computer processing cycles or accesses to large amounts of data. Grid computing uses software to split and distribute pieces of a program to as many as several thousand computers. A quantity of corporations, professional groups and university consortia has developed frameworks and software for managing grid computing projects.
Therefore, the Grid computing model allows companies to use a large number of computing resources on demand, irrespective of where they are situated. Several computational tasks can be presented using a computational grid. Grid computing gives clustering of remotely distributed computing environment. The principal attention of grid computing to date has been on maximizing the use of available processor resources for compute- intensive applications. Grid computing along with storage virtualization and server virtualization allows a utility computing. Usually it has a Graphical User Interface (GUI), which is a program interface based on the graphics capabilities of the computer to make screens or windows.
Grid computing uses the resources of many separate computers linked by a network (usually the internet) to answer large-scale computation problems. The SETI@home project, opened in the mid-1990s, was the primary widely-known grid computing project, and it has been followed by several others project covering tasks such as research into drugs for cancer, protein folding, climate models and mathematical problems.
Grid computing offers a model for solving massive computational problems by making use of the unused resources (disk storage and/or CPU cycles) of large numbers of disparate, often desktop, computers behaved as a virtual cluster embedded in a distributed telecommunications infrastructure. Grid computing focus on the ability to support computation across administrative domains which sets it apart from traditional computer clusters or traditional distributed computing.
Several systems which can participate in the grid computing as platform are: Windows 3.1, 95/98, NT, DOS, OS/2, and 2000 XP, supported by Intel (x86); Mac OS A/UX (UNIX) supported by Motorola 680 x0;
AIX (UNIX), Mac OS, OS X (UNIX) supported by Power PC; HP / UX (UNIX) supported by HP 9000 (PA - RISC);
Windows NT, Digital Unix open VMS supported by Compaq Alpha;
VMS Ultrix (UNIX) supported by DEC VAX; Solaris (Unix) supported by SPARC station;
AIX (UNIX) supported by IBM RS / 6000;
IRIS (UNIX) supported by Silicon Graphics workstation.