Weaving Electrical and Computational Grids: How Analogous Are They?

Inspired by the electrical power grid’s ability to provide a pervasive access to power in a consistent and dependable manner, computer scientists began exploring the design and development of an analogous infrastructure called the computational power grid for the 21 century network computing. At present, such computational grids enable sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed resources for solving large scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. In order to identify the potential of computational grids’ ability to make impact on our economy similar to the electrical grids, it is essential to identify the characteristics of various components, systems and methods along with the salient features and the analogous nature of both these systems. It is hoped that such comparison and contrasting of the features of these technologies and their infrastructures will provide further momentum to improve the current state-of-the-art in computational grids. It will help in identifying what areas need to be further focused upon. In this article, we briefly note historical background, architecture, and technology for the computational power grids; discuss its operational model, policies and establish an analogy with the electrical power grid. We compare and contrast the two grids to identify the way they deal and address management and access issues; and to learn from each other’s success and failure.