Some thinking about the way REBOL could be used ... if it is not already

Hi Rebolers, Here is a content I received that could be of interest to some of you. It vaguely defines what Grid Computing is and I found REBOL could be a brick and mortar for glueing this concept since it is already used for p2p apps that after all reflects in some way this vision. Regards, Gerard <article> australia.internet.com Weekly Newsletter | --------------------------------------------- Inside today's issue on Nanotechnology: - A Battery's Best Friend - Telco Act Turns Five - The Great Heist - A Company Born Global - Events Calendar _____________________________________________ ::: Grid Computing ::: The Network Is The Computer By Niki Scevak Speedy networks give rise to grid computing. A decade ago, within the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Ian Foster and his cohorts had some ideas about the way companies should process data. The scientists within the high performance computing division had spotted a curious trend; The speed of a network was growing at around twice the relative rate than processors were. If at some stage they were to converge the definition of a computer would change. Sounding more like a contemplation that existentialist Jean-Paul Satre might have, the energy research lab academics persisted. Foster, an associate division director at the distributed systems lab at Argonne, says the mandate was to complement other projects. Grid computing put simply was a "tool for science problem solving." The US Government had funded a number of physical academic research networks, akin to what AARNet is in Australia. They saw that their investment in physical infrastructure needed to be broadened to include concepts like grid computing, that controlled and put to use what was already there. Foster and others got funding, and the Globus Project was born. Wondering what grid computing is? Foster says there are three key characteristics. The application must run over multiple domains, it must co-ordinate disparate resources and there must be something that looks after quality of service. Still too abstract? You will probably have heard of the [Seti--Home] project or others such as the ones that hope to cure cancer. Basically, hundreds of thousands of users download a software client that can run as a screen saver on a PC and proffer their spare processing cycles. Science get processing cheap, and users contribute to worthwhile causes. Both these projects are, of course, examples of grid computing, and both highlight that processing power isn't always where it is needed - the fundamental problem grid computing is trying to address. Read the full story online - http://australia.internet.com/r/article/jsp/sid/12204 </article>