A Practical Application for Grid Computing

Grids today appear mostly in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments, where hundreds of inexpensive compute nodes link together to solve parallel processing problems that previously could only have been addressed by using supercomputers. Storage grids were developed to supply the enormous amounts of data that such processing power was capable of producing and consuming. Properly managed, storage and throughput scale linearly with computing power. Grids are a proven technology when it comes to HPC, but such sites are typically seen as a special case of computing, where computational performance is often the only criterion that really matters.