| The continuous progress in scientific research is itself an explanation of the insatiable demand for computational power. On the other hand, one of the results of scientific progress is the availability of more and more powerful computer platforms. This self-feeding cycle is pushing our search for knowledge towards very challenging investigations, and parallel computing nowadays plays an important role in this scenario. This is especially driven by the present-day enhancement in distributed computing, which has produced a substantial reduction in the costs of effective supercomputing facilities.
Another emerging trend, due to the improvement of distributed information technologies (IT), is the acceleration of research and development processes towards concurrent and cooperative engineering. Daily workflows in academic and industrial activities are more and more based on interaction among remote entities, which in some cases are physical people and in others are agents or facilities embedding value-adding procedures. An IT infrastructure is, most of the time, the core of such processes.
In the last decade, these important evolutions have been accompanied by the so-called Internet revolution and the boom in Web applications. The extraordinary perspectives opened by the Web have reinforced the momentum towards process integration and cooperative computing. Consequently, joining together supercomputing facilities and the world of Web-based tools seems to be the key feature to opening new perspectives in industrial and scientific computational processes, and an emerging technology is being proposed as the most natural way to pursue such a goal: grid computing (GC). |