What is the difference between Cloud Computing and

Question

What are the significant differences between Cloud Computing and Grid Computing ? What are the precise definations and target application domains for both ? I'm looking for conceptual insights along with technicalities.

Like Windows Azure is a Cloud OS, do we have anytihng such for Grid Computing ?

In past I did work on distributed and parallel computing and I used the librariries like PVM and MPI for processing distribution. Out of curiosity I wanted to know If Grid Computing is distributed computing extended over internet ?

Answer 1

There are a lot of good answers to this question already but another way to take a look at it is the cloud (ala Amazon's AWS) is good for interactive use cases and the grid (ala High Performance Computing) is good for batch use cases.

Cloud is interactive in that you can get resources on demand via self service. The code you run on VMs in the cloud, such as the Apache web server, can server clients interactively.

Grid is batch in that you submit jobs to a job queue after obtaining the credentials from some HPC authority to do so. The code you run on the grid waits in that queue until there are sufficient resources to execute it.

There are good use cases for both styles of computing.

Answer 2

Cloud Computing is a large group of interconnected computers.The data are hidden form the user. Grid computing is more than one computers interconnected to resolve the problem.grid computing is worked in cloud computing.