Abstract:

The Grid seems to be everywhere with announcements of sales from major computer vendors, deployment in a wide range of application spaces and many national and international scale infrastructure deployment. However, in spite of the popularity of the term, there is often confusion about what the Grid is and what problems it solves. Is there any "there there" or is it all just marketing hype?

In this talk, I will address these questions, describing what the Grid is, what problems it solves, and what technology has been developed to build Grid infrastructure and create Grid applications. I will review the current status of Grid infrastructure and deployment and give examples of where Grid technology is being used to not only do current tasks better, but provide fundamentally new types of capabilities that are not possible otherwise.