Cloud Computing vs. Grid Computing

Two such solutions are Grid Computing and Cloud Computing. In order to make the most advantageous choice, it is important for a business to understand the differences between each type of computing solutions

The following outlines the differences between Grid Computing and Cloud Computing:

Grid Computing: Grid Computing is computing technology that includes a combination of computer resources that offers seamless access to computing power and data storage capacity distributed over the globe. Special software is used to separate and outsource parts of a program as one large system image to multiple computers. Users utilizing grid computing will not perform system administrator tasks as systems administrators are involved with installing, upgrading, and virtualizing servers and its applications. The technology has a failover component on one node to prevent a failure of one part of the software on a node to impact the entire system. Grid computing systems require a significant financial investment because hardware and other components have to be acquired. Users can provision computing resources to turn ‘on’ or ‘off’ so it can work as a work utility.

Cloud Computing: Developed from grid computing technology, cloud computing technology offers highly flexible on-demand provisioning of its resources. Over-provisioning is eliminated as Cloud computing has on-demand resource provisioning which helps enterprise significantly cut IT costs.  The customer does not own the platform, infrastructure, or software in the cloud. With cloud computing, users have the ability to scale up to larger capacities at a moment’s notice without having to purchase new computing infrastructure, hire more IT computing experts, and they do not have to license software. Cloud computing operates on a utility basis where users pay for only the resources they use which makes it a more economical computing choice. As well, the computing infrastructure involves connecting various computers across multiple servers making it a large virtual environment which allows users to harness the power and performance of the many resources available.

With cloud computing, enterprise can outsource their data infrastructure ensuring data remains safe and secure in the event of a disaster such as a power outage. Another benefit for business is companies can avoid the high costs of creating an internal data center that is secure. The cloud provider maintains the servers and networks and the sharing of resources among a large pool of users decreases infrastructure costs and peak load capacity. As long as users have access to a computer device and the internet, they can access the server from anywhere.

Although Cloud Computing and Grid Computing both offer high scalability, multitasking, and multitenancy, however the Cloud offers better storage solutions because with grid computing, it is not economically beneficial for storing very small data. The choice of computing technology for each business will depend on their particular business IT infrastructure needs and requirements

 

Glasnua: Powerline Bpl Smart Grid Technology Adding Intelligence to Power Utility Networks

Former European cable execs see BPL parallels

Tom Walsh and Patricia McGrath were executives at UPC Broadband — now owned by Liberty Global. The Netherlands-based firm grew from a 200-user cable modem trial network in Amsterdam in the mid 90s to a customer base of over 1.5 million cable broadband subscribers in 14 countries in 2002. Walsh was vice president of engineering and then operations and McGrath was vice president of network planning and implementation.

The two left UPC and in 2005 they started Glasnua Ltd. in Ireland. They looked at various alternative technologies and soon found BPL. Glasnua, are convinced BPL is the technology it had been looking for and set its sights on deploying BPL for utility services and retail triple play throughout Europe .

Walsh and McGrath spoke to us Thursday from their headquarters in County Kerry in Southwest Ireland .Walsh is CTO and McGrath is director.“ Europe will offer incredible opportunity for ‘smart grid’ technology players for the next 10 years,” said Walsh. He believes the key for BPL technology firms to succeed in Europe will be to maintain a presence without draining resources and funds.

www.glasnua.com is set up to help. The firm’s been trying to land BPL projects with utilities but like everywhere, European utilities have resisted.EU’s pushing BPL

“Utilities have been slow to come to the table so far — but here in Europe the EU is actively pushing the technology,” said Walsh. Why is the government of Europe pushing BPL?

A BPL initiative is underway to “overcome the energy challenges presented by a rapidly expanding [EU] membership where demand is outstripping supply,” Walsh reported. He and McGrath are involved in that government effort and they’re confident “it will happen,” she added. The firm wants to introduce to Europe some of the main players in the BPL world “that have existing and proven technologies and proven business cases so that we can jump start some technology trials.

“We believe that some of the strongest players have a great opportunity to be in at the beginning” — with a real possibility to turn those trials into commercial deployments.

Glasnua hopes to avoid “open-ended science experiments — that I think have been some people’s experience in the past,” said McGrath. Some of the utilities in the EU are trying to “reinvent the wheel,” she added — and Glasnua wants to show them wheels are “already out there,” she added.

The challenge for Glasnua is to make deals with international BPL technology firms including US firms and represent them in Europe.The name says it all

Glasnua learned early that utilities aren’t usually interested in hype about the broadband business. True to its name, the firm is focused on utility applications and sees that market offering huge potential. Commercial broadband is a side benefit that can be delivered by firms that lease bandwidth from the utility, he noted.

But the need for the 21st century smart grid is urgent. The EU grew from 15 to 27 countries in the last 3 years, Walsh reminded. Many have rapidly growing economies that are putting incredible demand on power grids.

These states have limited raw resources for energy production and a lack of organization in the power interconnection between countries. The EU doesn’t have a system to manage the grid or know “who’s producing power” and who’s using it.

“Smart grid efficiency and control are finally being seen as the way to integrate and manage the various networks” — and cut reliance on generators outside the Union, said Walsh.

Meanwhile less developed nations in the EU are trying to build their economies and getting access to broadband is a key ingredient. “Pilot projects are being planned to take the best existing solutions and test them for commercial roll-outs throughout Europe.”

Walsh expects BPL’s role to expand as green power generation projects such as home-based generation, solar panels, wind farms, tidal power and more start populating the grid. Interconnection with those projects will make managing the reliability of the grid ever more complicated — and some look to BPL as an obvious answer to managing that complexity.They saw cable get smart

BPL reminds Walsh of the early days of cable. People in 1997 told him cable modem networks “couldn’t happen, it wouldn’t work — we were dreaming.” BPL is in roughly the same position as cable was then — with a lack of standards, some engineering challenges in creating networks plus it’s got its nay sayers.

The broadband boom in Europe was similar to “the wave that’s building for smart grids. ”Cable traditionally was a one-way, wire-based distribution network. Sounds familiar.

Cable modem technology introduced tremendous advantages by adding IP to those networks.Suddenly the operator could see the condition of every piece of gear on the network all the way to the customer’s modem.

That gave Walsh a brand new kind of power in making financial decisions. He could make choices on where to spend money on the network — based not on which technology officer in field wrote the most compelling request, “but on actual live statistics,” he stressed.

His operational crews — that had only ever been reactive — could now act proactively based on real-time data and “before stuff breaks.” Walsh would set targets and key performance indicators for his managers and then “see how they were doing — not based on a score card but actual real statistics, real facts.” www.glasnua.com QUOTE OF THE WEEK: All of a sudden you had huge efficiencies coming into the operation which means you gave better end-service to the customer. At the same time you were able to reduce costs of providing the service. This was all happening in the cable sector probably in the years of 2002, 2003. Take that benefit and combine it with BPL and you are making that business case look much rosier.

Tom Walsh, CTO, Glasnua These folks have scaled

Another similarity with cable is the problem utilities face in scaling data networks to cover entire utility footprints. Those are the same problems Walsh tackled with cable-based broadband, he reminded.

It takes “business nerve” to wait for the opportunities to ripen — and then capital to take advantage of the moment when it’s right.

Superior technology will win out, he added. “For us, ‘smart grids’ is nothing new. www.glasnua.com/aboutus.html

“We deployed similar technology on communications networks and quickly realized the operational benefits when scaling is handled correctly.”

“The smart grids principle is not new. “It’s been [used] in the telecom sector for over four years and has revolutionized both technical and operational management.

“These benefits can now be realized by power utilities, too”

Grid Computing in Distributed Gis

Grid Computing

Some consider this to be the “the third information technology wave” after the Internet and Web, and will be the backbone of the next generation of services and applications that are going to further the research and development of GIS and related areas.

Grid computing allows for the sharing of processing power, enabling the attainment of high performances in computing, management and services. Grid computing, (unlike the conventional supercomputer that does parallel computing by linking multiple processors over a system bus) uses a network of computers to execute a program. The problem of using multiple computers lies in the difficulty of dividing up the tasks among the computers, without having to reference portions of the code being executed on other CPUs.

Parallel processing

Parallel processing is the use of multiple CPU’s to execute different sections of a program together. Remote sensing and surveying equipment have been providing vast amounts of spatial information, and how to manage, process or dispose of this data have become major issues in the field of Geographic Information Science (GIS).

To solve these problems there has been much research into the area of parallel processing of GIS information. This involves the utilization of a single computer with multiple processors or multiple computers that are connected over a network working on the same task. There are many different types of distributed computing, two of the most common are clustering and grid processing.

The primary reasons for using parallel computing are:

Saves time.

Solve larger problems.

Provide concurrency (do multiple things at the same time).

Taking advantage of non-local resources – using available computing resources on a wide area network, or even the Internet when local computing resources are scarce.

Cost savings – using multiple “cheap” computing resources instead of paying for time on a supercomputer.

Overcoming memory constraints – single computers have very finite memory resources. For large problems, using the memories of multiple computers may overcome this obstacle.

Limits to serial computing – both physical and practical reasons pose significant constraints to simply building ever faster serial computers.

Limits to miniaturization – processor technology is allowing an increasing number of transistors to be placed on a chip.

However, even with molecular or atomic-level components, a limit will be reached on how small components can be.

Economic limitations – it is increasingly expensive to make a single processor faster. Using a larger number of moderately fast commodity processors to achieve the same (or better) performance is less expensive.

The future: during the past 10 years, the trends indicated by ever faster networks, distributed systems, and multi-processor computer architectures (even at the desktop level) clearly show that parallelism is the future of computing.

Distributed GIS

As the development of GIS sciences and technologies go further, increasingly amount of geospatial and non-spatial data are involved in GISs due to more diverse data sources and development of data collection technologies. GIS data tend to be geographically and logically distributed as well as GIS functions and services do. Spatial analysis and Geocomputation are getting more complex and computationally intensive. Sharing and collaboration among geographically dispersed users with various disciplines with various purposes are getting more necessary and common. A dynamic collaborative model -” Middleware” – is required for GIS application.

Computational Grid is introduced as a possible solution for the next generation of GIS. Basically, the Grid computing concept is intended to enable coordinate resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-organizational virtual organizations by linking computing resources with high-performance networks. Grid computing technology represents a new approach to collaborative computing and problem solving in data intensive and computationally intensive environment and has the chance to satisfy all the requirements of a distributed, high-performance and collaborative GIS. Some methodologies and Grid computing technologies as solutions of requirements and challenges are introduced to enable this distributed, parallel, and high-throughput, collaborative GIS application.

Security

Security issues in such a wide area distributed GIS is critical, which includes authentication and authorization using community policies as well as allowing local control of resource. Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI), combined with GridFTP protocol, makes sure that sharing and transfer of geospatial data and Geoprocessing are secure in the Computational Grid environment.

Conclusion

As the conclusion, Grid computing has the chance to lead GIS into a new “Grid-enabled GIS” age in terms of computing paradigm, resource sharing pattern and online collaboration.