Communications

The rapid growth in communication capacity among machines today makes grid computing practical, compared to the limited bandwidth available when distributed computing was first emerging. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that another important resource of a grid is data communication capacity. This includes communications within the grid and external to the grid.

Communications within the grid are important for sending jobs and their required data to points within the grid. Some jobs require a large amount of data to be processed, and it may not always reside on the machine running the job. The bandwidth available for such communications can often be a critical resource that can limit utilization of the grid.

External communication access to the Internet, for example, can be valuable when building search engines. Machines on the grid may have connections to the external Internet in addition to the connectivity among the grid machines.

When these connections do not share the same communication path, then they add to the total available bandwidth for accessing the Internet.

Redundant communication paths are sometimes needed to better handle potential network failures and excessive data traffic. In some cases, higher speed networks must be provided to meet the demands of jobs transferring larger amounts of data. A grid management system can better show the topology of the grid and highlight the communication bottlenecks. This information can in turn be used to plan for hardware upgrades.