| The continuous progress in scientific research is itself an explanation of the insatiable
demand for computational power. On the other hand, one of the results of scientific
progress is the availability of more and more powerful computer platforms.
This self-feeding cycle is pushing our search for knowledge towards very challenging
investigations, and parallel computing nowadays plays an important role in this
scenario. This is especially driven by the present-day enhancement in distributed
computing, which has produced a substantial reduction in the costs of effective
supercomputing facilities.
Another emerging trend, due to the improvement of distributed information
technologies (IT), is the acceleration of research and development processes
towards concurrent and cooperative engineering. Daily workflows in academic and
industrial activities are more and more based on interaction among remote entities,
which in some cases are physical people and in others are agents or facilities embedding
value-adding procedures. An IT infrastructure is, most of the time, the core of
such processes.
In the last decade, these important evolutions have been accompanied by the
so-called Internet revolution and the boom in Web applications. The extraordinary
perspectives opened by the Web have reinforced the momentum towards process
integration and cooperative computing. Consequently, joining together supercomputing
facilities and the world of Web-based tools seems to be the key feature to
opening new perspectives in industrial and scientific computational processes, and
an emerging technology is being proposed as the most natural way to pursue such a
goal: grid computing (GC). |
