The Network is the Grid?

Apologies to Sun for contorting their famous prediction in my headline.

But given that Grid has such profound implications for the future of distributed computing, it has been somewhat of a surprise that the networking vendors and telco service providers have not yet been very vocal about their Grid intentions. 

In this early stage of enterprise adoption, the systems and hardware vendors have been by far the most outspoken, and therefore the Grid discussions have been very specific to compute and data trends. 

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Apologies to Sun for contorting their famous prediction in my headline.

But given that Grid has such profound implications for the future of distributed computing, it has been somewhat of a surprise that the networking vendors and telco service providers have not yet been very vocal about their Grid intentions. 

In this early stage of enterprise adoption, the systems and hardware vendors have been by far the most outspoken, and therefore the Grid discussions have been very specific to compute and data trends. 

But recent stirrings suggest the enterprise Grid discussion is about to add a little networking flavor to the mix.

Cisco recently completed a quarter billion dollar acquisition of infiniband player, Topspin Communications, a server-fabric switch provider.  Cisco has made previous overtures into their role in the emerging utility datacenter (including a major partnership with IBM ), but this was the first time that Cisco has specifically put an acquisition in the context of Grid computing. 

"There's a specific reason why infiniband is interesting for Grid computing," said Ben Eiref, Director of Business Development at Topspin Communications (now with Cisco's Server Networking and Virtualization team).  "As enterprises move to scale out, commodity hardware environments, buying cheap boxes instead of SMPs - the issue is connecting all of these servers so that they talk together really fast and behave like a big system."

Infiniband is written around a low latency architecture called RDMA (remote direct memory access).  Infiniband allows nodes in a fabric to communicate directly without having to go through the TCP stack or kernel, which introduce a lot of latency and tend  to slow processors down.

Another major new development for Grid networking is that at Supercomm, the Global Grid Forum announced the formation of a Telecom Research Group, which intends to define the telecommunication industry's role in the Grid architecture.  Despite only recently having been formed, the group has already attracted service provider participants such as British Telecom, Sprint and Telecom Italia; and networking vendors such as Alcatel, Foundry and Nortel.

The Telecom Research Group has identified three preliminary areas in which it sees service providers participating in the Grid evolution:  (1) as enablers to Grid providers; (2) as users of Grids internally; and (3) as providers of managed Grid services.  The Telecom Research Group's primary interest is to get the best possible representation of vendor participants, so that the telecom industry can come to quick agreement on Grid networking standards.

"Grid networking is not just about brute force and how many bits per second you send - it's about how to finesse the network experience for Grid users, said Franco Travostino, director in the Advanced Technology / CTO office at Nortel, and one of the team leaders in the Telecom Research Group.  "We want to remove all sorts of GUI-driven and operator-driven issues so that the network can be controlled by software, with specific loops going on between the network and the software, without operators involved."