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Emerging
Technologies Project Fall
Term, 2001 EMBA ‘02 |
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Identification/definition of the technology Imagine that every time you plugged in a
toaster, you had to decide which power station should supply the electricity.
Worse still, you could select only from those power stations that were built
by the company that made your toaster. If the power station chosen happened
to be running at full capacity, no toast. Replace the toaster with a personal
computer and electrical power with processing power, and this gives a measure
of the frustration facing those who dream of distributing large computing
problems to dozens, hundreds or even millions of computers via the Internet. A growing band of computer engineers and scientists want
to take the toaster analogy to its logical conclusion with a proposal they
call “the Grid”. Although much of it is still theoretical, the Grid is, in
effect, a set of software tools which, when combined with clever hardware,
would let users tap processing power off the Internet as easily as electrical
power can be drawn from the electricity grid. Many scientific problems that
require truly massive amounts of computation, like designing drugs from their
protein blueprints, forecasting local weather patterns months ahead, or
simulating the airflow around an aircraft, could benefit hugely from the
Grid. And as the Grid bandwagon gathers speed, the commercial pay-off could
be handsome.
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