Many Flavors of Grid Computing

Good post: Nikita Ivanov: What is Grid Computing.

Mobile Code

It bends your brain a bit at first. And J2EE ClassLoader hell didn't help on the FUD front, but the future is not only about mobile data (ala SOA), but also mobile code.

GridGain does mobile code.

And it looks a wee bit more approachable than PreferredClassLoader.

Emerging from the Google OSS Grid Haze

Looks like GridGain is emerging from their semi-silence:

GridGain Systems announced today availability of the first public release of GridGain project, an enterprise open source grid computing platform for Java. This release culminates 18 months of development and presents a software product with unique set of grid computing features, open source LGPL licensing and clear focus on high-performance Java-based development.

"Almost two years ago we set out to develop a technology that would change the enterprise Java grid computing landscape in much the same way Spring and JBoss have changed the J2EE market through simplification and focusing on a developer. Today we are releasing our project that is based on proven professional open source model, business and community friendly LGPL licensing, and the host of unique grid computing features", said Nikita Ivanov, founder of GridGain project.

Tangosol (now owned by Oracle) and others gave us the Java "Data Grid". Perhaps GridGain can give us the "Compute Grid" part. This is what we struggled with in looking at data grid/caching technologies - you still needed the compute part somewhere. Tools like Tangosol excelled in bridging the gap between J2EE performance problems due to data latency issues. But that is only 1/2 of the problem in terms of application grids. You still need to be able to easily add compute nodes to be able to scale.

Without a compute grid, you need to rely on things like JMS or other bits of J2EE. This is of course fine in an evolution approach - just doesn't seem to fit right in a new large system (at least for me).

Could this be an application grid without the Jini/JavaSpaces baggage? Don't know - certainly borrows some Jini features (code mobility). They know how to document things and have a roadmap and bits so that is a start ;) Message to Apache River: see I'm not kidding, the clock is going tick, tick, tick - the future is coming.

This should be interesting to watch.

GridGain

GridGain smartly pays Google so they show up when you google "oss grid". Otherwise, they only show up on the second page and I wouldn't have seen it today.

I read about it for 30 minutes and didn't run away screaming. Looks like a pretty young product. I'm also a bit afraid of AOP, but I'm a simpleton. They also use Spring - see it is everywhere. But they are FOSS and run on JBoss so hey - maybe it isn't bad.

Anyways, thoughtful people that seem to know some stuff and know how to try to start a community by documenting things fairly well. They also seem to be disatisfied with highfalutin grids that talk big, but don't deliver. We can all relate to that.

Anybody know anything about it?

Grid & the Web vs. JavaSpaces

Some of the grid computing concepts look awful similar to JavaSpaces. And the community appears to be thriving (as opposed to Jini/JavaSpaces which is not).

There are some OSS projects and a number of commercial vendors. Done properly, you can use many different languages and platforms (as opposed to just Java with JavaSpaces).

Perhaps it is better? Simpler or more complicated? Not as good, but good enough? What about associative memory? Grid + REST + XMPP + Atom? Something else? More locked in or less?

I do love the promise of the tuple space. I hope some day it makes it into the mainstream. I no longer think it will any time soon, sadly. There are forces out there that I do not understand that will continue to relegate it to the niche category of "high performance computing". Until there is a thriving community around it, few will embrace it. I hope this changes. I certainly will be watching.

5/13/2007 9:45 PST Updated some links.