Grid Computing has become a popular phrase: it’s too popular. It’s tossed around by companies and marketing executives who fail to grasp that many of the fundamental problems are still to be solved before real Grid Computing can become a reality.

This is a bad thing.

A similar problem was seen in the UK several years ago when British Telecom’s mobile network (BT Cellnet) bought up all the stocks of the Nokia 7110 that the manufacturer could supply. BT then launched an ill advised advertising campaign with the killer slogan “Surf the net, surf the BT Cellnet.”. The upshot of this was that in early 1999 there were tens of thousands of new BT Cellnet customers who were expecting the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) to give them the kind of internet access on the move which only characters from the Matrix trilogy could aspire to.

The result was wholesale derision from the user community, and the WAP protocol all but died. Crucially it was not the fault of the protocol. The gulf between the marketing and the reality was insurmountable. The advert showed an ice-man-esque digital surfer, surrounded by cyber-data augmenting his very existence. The reality was a phone with a small monochrome screen and a slow processor, which meant that even thought the WML pages of only 1.5K could be loaded relatively quickly, they still took several seconds to render because the phone was just not good enough. During this rendering time, people were dialled up, and therefore paying, and therefore angry at BT Cellnet because the result was slower and less impressive than could have been expected from the perception they’d formed from the marketing. It’s a mistake that O2 (the rebranded BT Cellnet) have been careful not to repeat.

So we arrive in mid 2005 and everybody who wants investment from anybody has to get the word Grid in their pitch: and frankly, right now, and for the next 10 years, anyone who claims their systems offer Grid Computing needs their brain-oil changing.

The basic concepts of what grid computing might need in order to be realized are largely understood, and within this framework, protocols and systems are being proposed, trialled, revised, discarded, extended, etc. However, there are not just technical and conceptual issues to be solved, there are also moral dilemmas such as, “can ‘x’ be trusted not to use The Grid’s immense computing power to mount a cryptographic attack on ‘y’…”.

Grid computing is essentially the most complicated form of computing because it adds several layers on top of every other system already in existence – consequently it will be many years before commercial grids become available.

Even then there’s still no ocean of computing power that can be tapped to solve every problem. One of the Keynote talks at last year’s Cluster Computing and Grid Conference (CCGrid) in Chicago highlighted that to accurately simulate the digestive system of a single ant, at the atomic level, it would require more computing power than the entire planet combined.

So what’s happened so far with Grid Computing is that a few research systems and protocols have grown with more success than others, through both good judgement and good luck. Concurrently, some loosely coupled clustering systems have emerged that provide a near-term win in terms of an apparent abundance of computing capability, but which are not to be confused with Grid Computing, regardless of what their marketing tells you.

Please, don’t believe the hype, and don’t perpetuate the hype.