Grid and Cloud Computing

Grid computing is a form of distributed computing in which each every computer shares each other’s resources, like processors, memory and data in the network. The computers present in a grid computing system can have same or different operating system. Grids tend to be composed of multiple clusters, and are typically loosely coupled, heterogeneous and geographically dispersed.

Cloud computing refers to a large scale distributed computing paradigm driven by:
1. economics of scale,
2. virtualization,
3. dynamically scalable resources, and
4. delivered on demand over the Internet.

Cloud computing has evolved from grid Computing. In Grid Computing, if a single node fails, it may result in the failure of the entire grid, which is not the case in Cloud Computing.

In Grid Computing, it is not economically suited for storing objects as small as 1 byte. In a data grid, the amounts of distributed data must be large for maximum benefit. A cloud can store data of any size.