Friday's session, a finale -- "Clouds and Grids"

So the Friday session was an interesting one, to say the least. The topic varied sharply from the previous set of topics to a future-looking commercialization topic, that of virtualization of hardware and commoditization of the grid. Now, if you participated and thought I brought away the wrong concept from this, feel free to let me know.

Here's what I boiled down the gist of Friday's single session to: virtualization is a key component in rapid deployment of technologies on the grid, and the use of virtualization technologies can allow cluster administrators and grid manipulators to move resources to where they can be most effective in a logical fashion, all while avoiding the underlying failure of physical machines as much as possible. The focus was on technologies like KVM, Xen, and VMWare and organizations like Amazon (EC2) and Google (AppEngine).

It is not fair of me to say that these two types of cloud or grid computing are disparate entities, because they're not. They're closely interwoven. However, it's also not fair of anyone else to say that they are directly tied together, except as all things seem to be directly tied together. Grid as it exists now is a means to solve large problems, and Cloud as it exists is a means to provide the solvers for those large problems. They're complimentary. I just don't personally see where it had anything to do with the rest of the school, except both are about huge numbers of computers under the control of a few operators. This is a subjective opinion, and if you have your own opinion, feel free to voice it below, or write yer own post ;)

At the moment I'm posting this as complete, but expect a followup post before too long for me to redress part of this. The total composition of Friday's presentation obviously cannot be compiled into three paragraphs, but neither can any other day's session be compiled as short as I've made those. It's just that Friday's session was the most pertinent to a "moving forward" group of students.