[ Cloud Computing ] Re: Do EC2 and others really offer grid computing?

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 1:58 AM, Pradeep Tapadiya
<pradeeptapadiya@gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I am new to this group but am reasonably familiar with cloud computing. This
> weekend, I will be setting my account on Amazon EC2.
>
> Among other things, cloud computing incorporates grid computing. What I am
> trying to understand is how EC2 and other infrastructure providers are
> actually implementing grid computing.
>
> When an application running on EC2 requires requires more computing power,
> possibly beyond what one physical CPU can ever handle, how exactly EC2
> provides this additional power?
>
> The infrastructure platform has to take the binary code of the application,
> analyze it and intelligently distribute it across various physical CPUs.
> This may be possible for some simple cases. However, for most cases, this is
> practically impossible.
>
> Today's OSes cannot even automatically break an application across multiple
> threads.All they do is provide APIs for application developers to handle
> multi-threading.
>
> Perhaps the infrastructure platform provides similar APIs to break our work
> across multiple logical CPUs.
>
> Appreciate your insight.
>

Personally, I don't think EC2 is offering any grid, but as Andrew says
it is just a set of building blocks and an API. Indeed, based on these
you can build your grid, but this falls into your responsibility and I
don't think the current API is specially meant for this.

I would like to point out that your last paragraphs are more about
parallelism and not exactly grid computing.

./alex
--
.w( the_mindstorm )p.
Alexandru Popescu

> Pradeep
> >
>

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