Chapter 26. How Grid Computing Works

How Grid Computing Works

The world’s biggest supercomputer is not an individual machine with massive processing power. Instead, it’s a collection of tens of thousands of normal-sized individual computers like the one sitting on your desk, whose power can be combined into one giant system.

That’s the promise of grid computing. And it’s not just a promise. It’s already working.

The theory behind grid computing is fairly straightforward. It combines the computational power of many computers, servers, databases, and other computing resources in a network or across the Internet. A main server or servers breaks up large computational ...

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