Again affected by my timetable changes I missed the first lecture on this subject. Apperently the MUSO system is still being used here so it took some tracking down but did manage to find the subjects resources. Unit resources: http://users.monash.edu.au/~asadk/units/fit5164/, see MUSO for username and password.
A quick summary from the lecture notes of lecture 1:
Unit leader: Dr Asad Khan
Grids enable ‘On-Demand’ computing, examples of grids are P2P networks and clusters. From my understanding at this point they key is shared computing resources. Some basic definition and information can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing. A question that came to mind when reading the introductory material is the difference between cloud computing and grid computing? A good response to this question can be found here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-cloudgrid/. In essence, cloud computing goes a bit further than grid computing by dynamically allocating resources on demand.
Reading on the next lecture slide document it appears the above question may have been tackled by the lecturer, some other jargon definitions where also provided:
- Service oriented architecture [SOA]: An approach for data sharing and interoperability among enterprise applications, is a conceptual framework (not a technical solution).
- Software as a service [SaaS]: Applications on demand through a web browser.
- Cloud computing: Dynamic allocation of computing resources to services over the internet (A technical solution for SOA and SaaS).
- grid: enterprise-wide grids (linking of computers for sharing load, name from power grid)
- Grid: global grid
- Parallel processing: Parallel applications formed the need.
- Symmetric multiprocessing [SMP] (coarse-grained) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing
- Clusters (medium-grained) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cluster
- Massive parallel processing [MPP] (fine grained) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_parallel_processing
There were a number of topics covered such as Java and Globus which did not have any expanded details in the lecture notes. This suggests that lecture attendance will be important for this subject.