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Totally Unplugged
Grid computing captured imaginations by creating Net-based virtual supercomputers out of hundreds of thousands of existing computers. But like many big ideas, grid computing is fraught with challenges, and the best opportunities might prove quite different from what pioneers envisioned.
The technical benefits of aggregating the computational power of computers residing on the same network are clear. But the business benefits must be weighed against concerns such as cost, security and manageability.
There are three radically different types of grid computing: Net-based, enterprise and supply-chain.
From the outset, visionaries targeted the most distant of the three: leveraging the Internet as a source of unprecedented, on-demand computational power. For...