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What is Grid Computing?

What is Grid Computing? Grid Computing is a term that's being bandied about more and more in the IT industry – and, unusually for this industry, it's an extremely important thing to know about, because it might just be the future for the average computer network.  The fundamentals of parallel computing Most of us have come across Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP) – servers that have more than one processing unit. The idea is that by putting multiple processors in a computer it can do more work, in a shorter time, by allocating different tasks to different processors. All the processors can work "in parallel" – i.e. several bits of work get done at once because several processors are doing their own particular tasks independently of the others. The next step up is Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) – where you have a sizeable collection of processors, generally not in the same box, all doing their own bit of work in parallel. The difference between MPP and SMP