On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 02:41:17PM +0100, Tim Cutts wrote: > The only reason Seti@home succeeded as a grid computing project is that > the compute/IO ratio is *huge*. Genomics applications just can't do > this, although conceivably some things such as molecular dynamics > simulations might. (I hate to do this, but it is an important distinction as different concepts and solutions are involved). SETI@home is a distributed computing project - not a Grid project. It is essentially a single program, special-purpose, and many people choose to run it on their computers. A Grid is a network, or an infrastructure (rather than a program), so it's a different sort of concept. Research in the areas obviously overlap, but it's more helpful to think of Grid as the network, and of distributed computing projects (SETI@home, Folding@home) as programs. Grid research is more about building infrastructure (computer science) than it is about an optimal implementation of your science on a computer (computational science). Argh, pedanticism and terminology. But this is the general gist. (?) Kp -- Karl Podesta School of Computing Dublin City University, Ireland