ADTmag.com: Have you noticed how lately, when the conversation turns to distributed computing, grid and cluster are used as synonyms? These two words do have different meanings, Donald Becker reminds us.

“Clustering takes multiple independent machines, and through software and networking, makes them appear as a single, more powerful and/or reliable machine,” Becker says. “What you are trying to do is to create a unified virtual system over multiple single machines. Grid is a concept that involves working with a large number of separately administered machines. With grid, you don’t control the configuration, the operating systems, the libraries installed—anything. So it’s a lot more difficult to ensure that that application is going to run remotely.”

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