As computer networks become cheaper and more powerful, a new computing paradigm is poised to transform the practice of science and engineering. Driven by increasingly complex problems and propelled by increasingly powerful technology, today’s science is as much based on computation, data analysis, and collaboration as on the efforts of individual experimentalists and theorists. But even as computer power, data storage, and communication continue to improve exponentially, computational resources are failing to keep up with what scientists demand of them | Reprint from Physics Today 2002 American Institute of Physics. Minor changes to the original have been made to conform with house style. 2 The Grid A new infrastructure for 21st century science Ian Foster Argonne National Laboratory Argonne Illinois United States As computer networks become cheaper and more powerful a new computing paradigm is poised to transform the practice of science and engineering. Driven by increasingly complex problems and propelled by increasingly powerful technology today s science is as much based on computation data analysis and collaboration as on the efforts of individual experimentalists and theorists. But even as computer power data storage and communication continue to improve exponentially computational resources are failing to keep up with what scientists demand of them. A personal computer in 2001 is as fast as a supercomputer of 1990. But 10 years ago biologists were happy to compute a single molecular structure. Now they want to calculate the structures of complex assemblies of macromolecules see Figure and screen thousands of drug candidates. Personal computers now ship with up to 100 gigabytes GB of storage - as much as an entire 1990 supercomputer center. But by 2006 several physics projects CERN s Large Hadron Collider LHC among them will produce multiple petabytes 1015 byte of data per year. Some wide area networks now operate at 155megabits per second Mbs-1 three orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art 56kilobits per second Kb s-1 that connected . supercomputer centers in 1985. But Grid Computing - Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality. Edited by F. Berman A. Hey and G. Fox 2003 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBN 0-470-85319-0 52 IAN FOSTER Figure Determining the structure of a complex molecule such as the cholera toxin shown here is the kind of computationally intense operation that Grids are intended to tackle. Adapted from G. von Laszewski et al. Cluster Computing 3 3 page 187 2000 . to work with .
