[.ca] The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure (ISBN 1558609334)

From Amazon.com:
Beyond the Net, say Foster, Kesselman, and a host of impressive contributors, lies the Grid. While the Net allows users everywhere to share information, the Grid will allow users to share raw computing power. The goal is to put full supercomputing capabilities into the hands of anyone who needs it while providing for more efficient use of the supercomputers of tomorrow. The potential benefits to science, government, and business may well be beyond imagination. Foster and Kesselman have gathered together essays, proposals, and ruminations of more than 30 distinguished stars of the high-speed computing and networking world in order to do four things: make the case for developing computational grids, provide ideas on how such grids may be designed, demonstrate how the grids might be used, and point out the research still needed to make it happen. While the book was written to serve as a possible textbook in advanced networking, it makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the future of network computing. The text covers Grid applications, the programming tools required, the services that will be provided, and an examination of Grid infrastructure. Despite being the work of so many authors, the chapters are logically arranged so that the knowledge needed to understand one chapter is provided by those that precede it. --Elizabeth Lewis

Startling look into the future:
I don't understand some of the critical reviews of this book. The fact is that Grids do exist today and are being used by Research oriented companies. About two dozen companies are already serving clients in the realm of grid computing. Platform Computing, United Devices, and Avaki are just three companies who are helping to create the future of the grid computing. The web succeded because it connected everybody. Until larger grids are contructed for business enterprises I agree that grid computing will not grow. The book does a great job of showing what the future may be like in terms of grid computing. Someday your computing resources will come from your local Grid Computing Company just as you get electricity from your Power Company. How that comes to be is still the ultimate question.

Pie in the Sky with no technical backup - worthless:
My title says it all. This is one of those "hand wave across the map" kind of books, and to call it a textbook is doing it quite a favor. If that's what you're into - a lot of dreams with no technical info to back it up, this book - and the most recent Starfleet manual - are for you. If you genuinely want to learn about real subjects in the area of high performance computing and networking, tho, skip this thing with prejudice.

Hear the authors out:
Boy, when was VA declared an imagination-free zone? Don't the critical reviewers of this book have any belief in the possibilities afforded by grid computing? To complain that the book is light on technical detail is somewhat churlish, because the purpose of the book was to examine the possibilities, not show you how to code one up in an afternoon at the comfort of your desk. Can there be any doubt that computing grids will start to become popular in some form or another? I don't think there is any doubt at all. Perhaps when some of the research and early work is complete and the standards agreed, some enterprising author can write a book on grid computing with more technical meat on the bone, but until that work is done, what would be the point? I suspect there just isn't all that much technical detail to point at yet. To my way of thinking, all the possible uses and configurations of computing grids are still to be discovered. If you are one of the explorers intent on doing something new and different with the technology, then this book is for you. If you are only content to follow the crowd, once all the technical details have been worked out and served up on a plate to you by somebody else, then by all means skip this book and wait for one with more technical gravitas.

Excellent Book into the future:
This is a great buy and an excellent book into the future. Very well explained collection of topics.

Cheerleading and little tech! Very dissappointing!:
This book is full of visions of the future and other hyperbole. The "grid" is discussed as if it: a) is already in existence or b) is completely planned and the subsystems are tested, and is just waiting implementation. Neither could be further from the truth. While making hopeful predictions about the future is a good way to guide your thoughts and help in planning, it is sill just a guess! In particular, the notion of a "computational grid", analogous to the power grid, is quite a reach. This concept is not a technical one so much as a social/business one. I just don't buy it. The technical content of the book is limited. Few new concepts are presented, are scattered and poorly explained. For instance, I don't need this book to learn about 3-tier architecture. The best feature appears to be the surprisingly complete bibliography of reference papers. Networks will continue to expand, in number and critically, in capacity. Computers, and the services that run on them, will take advantage of this added connectivity in ways that are not yet clear. But, this is far from the ubiquitous utility model where anyone can plug in anywhere receiving any service for a modest fee. Lastly, the whole pretext of a completely planned grid that is proposed is shot down by the author's own arguments that services and utilities have grown mainly due to unanticipated forces. i.e. the whole example of the city of Chicago. No one planned a vast city, but it grew nonetheless. In this sense, I'm sure that if something like the grid will come to fruition, it will happen without the massive planning and government spending that is implied in the book.