Industry Expert Blogs
Cloud computing is not grid computing-November 29, 2011 |
Recently I had a few discussions with people looking at leveraging the cloud. They were looking at extending their own compute farm by establishing a VPN to a public cloud and borrowing computing resources as needed.
With a compute farm, you have a fixed amount of computing resources. You rely on an engine like LSF (Load Sharing Facility) or SGE (Sun Grid Engine) to schedule and prioritize jobs to best use these fixed computing resources. The rule of the game is to keep the queue as short as possible, or better, to keep the relative processing time increase as small as possible.