Grid computing vs clouding computing

Grids and current Clouds so far:
- Grid systems are designed for collaborative sharing of resources belonging to different admin domains, while Clouds at the moment expose the resources of one domain to the outside world
- Grid systems support the execution of end-users applications as computational activities; a typical computational activity once accepted by a Grid endpoint, is locally handled by a batch system as a batch job; Clouds are mainly used for the remote deployment of services
– this is an important difference; Grids provide more domain-specific services; Clouds can sit below (the RightGrid can be a typical example of this)
– Grids are moving towards the adoption of virtual machine tecnologies, but the usage pattern will be the same (the submitted job is bound with the execution environment as VM image)
- Grid systems support large set of users organized in virtual organizations (credentials are typically enriched with VO-related information); Cloud systems support individual users (to my knowledge)

I would not see the size of allocation as a factor for differentiating them.

ou know, a lot of people really get confused on cloud vs grid. The two are closely related. I always think about it in the terms of virtualization vs grid (since I work for VMware). Grid is great if you have an app that needs a lot of combined compute cycles. Virtualization is great if you have a lot of apps that need a little compute cycles each.

Now enter cloud. Cloud really encompasses both of these. The point of cloud is you don’t have to care if you have a grid infrastructure underneath or a virtualization infrastruture underneath. All you do is deploy your app to the cloud and let the cloud figure out how to get the app the resources it needs.

That’s why cloud is the over arching architecture for virtualization or grid or SaaS or PaaS or anything else. All of these can play in the cloud together at the same time. You build your cloud with these blocks as you see fit and based on what you want your cloud to do. Simple as that.