The differences are on two levels: technology and business model. Grid is a technology to federate and share resources of different ownership. Cloud is a technology to sell resources that belong to one provider. Grid is communism, Cloud is capitalism, to make it simple. Technologies differ because of different business models. Both can make use of virtualised resources, but while for Grids virtualisation is not too important, for Clouds it is necessary. I disagree with the answer above that suggests that Grids provide IaaS - no, they actually don't. Computing Grid services are interfaces to various resource management systems or environments, not to bare infrastructure. Grid is realised as a middleware - a layer on top of existing systems (which may be virtual). Cloud is not a middleware, it is a resource management solution by itself.

I think grid and cloud are two totally different technologies. Cloud computing is based on data centers own by vendors, either public or private and are using virtualization technology as coore to offer various types of services like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS as three fundamental services while grid only can provide IaaS. Cloud provides elastic pay-as-you-use services meaning that you can increase or decrease required resource in on-demand without upfront investment. Execution time is another major difference, grid needs execution scheduling while cloud is on-demand and real time. hope it helps

The focus of grid computing seems to focus on computationally intensive activities (e.g., SETI, protein folding, etc.), typically taking advantage of spare cycles in network systems. Cloud, whether by deliberate action or market forces, has focused more on classic Internet applications, "big data" storage (see prior comment on private/vendor-based data centers) and virtualization.

Have a look at the article: Cloud Computing Over Cluster, Grid

Computing: a Comparative Analysis

http://www.bioinfo.in/uploadfiles/13152864121_1_1_JGDC.pdf

Cloud is dynamically virtualizable environment, provides everything in terms of services.

Grid is static and not hardly associated with services concept!

The differences are on two levels: technology and business model. Grid is a technology to federate and share resources of different ownership. Cloud is a technology to sell resources that belong to one provider. Grid is communism, Cloud is capitalism, to make it simple. Technologies differ because of different business models. Both can make use of virtualised resources, but while for Grids virtualisation is not too important, for Clouds it is necessary. I disagree with the answer above that suggests that Grids provide IaaS - no, they actually don't. Computing Grid services are interfaces to various resource management systems or environments, not to bare infrastructure. Grid is realised as a middleware - a layer on top of existing systems (which may be virtual). Cloud is not a middleware, it is a resource management solution by itself.

While there are plenty of commercial cloud solutions, "big data", geo-distributed data, and virtualization solutions are quite common as 'private clouds' (one of the models defined by NIST. I would agree with Oxana that Grid solutions, if anything, offer software as a service solutions if we really need/want to classify them. Finally, while virtualization for applications or thin client desktops are highly effective, big data and geo-distributed data solutions are still best run directly on "iron".

Hi Dr Oxana. grid as you mentioned plays the role of mediator or middleware aiming to provide IaaS for the end-users regardless of underlying complexities. Both interpretations are correct just have difference view. Cloud computing is a complex system including middleware (cloud platform such as Aneka or Eucalyptus and ...) and infrastructures that are owned by cloud vendors. Rajkumar buyya and his colleagues in "Cloud computing and emerging IT platforms: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the 5th utility" article explain the differentiate cloud and cloud computing. Cloud is the pure infrastructure and cloud computing is the technology that brings the infrastructures (and many more services like software and platform) to the user according to the pay-as-you-use principal.

Cloud and grid computing are really two different models. The grid model, at it's simplest, is taking advantage of lots of CPUs with spare cycles to run algorithms over data. The cloud offers a combination business and technical model that provides data sharing, storage, virtualization, applications under a business model that provides various levels of services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) to consumers for a fee. The grid is a solution to a problem, the cloud is a model for doing business.

It would be good to look at the time at which both these became "hot" topics to understand some of the perceived differences. A grid was an attempt to connect up a bunch of good computing (may be storage, visualisation, etc also) resources to provide a richer environment, mostly for academic computing requirements, and with hardly any commercial model. A cloud came as a business solution to provide resources with elasticity using the notion of a service and relying heavily on virtualisation. In theory, there is no reason, why a grid cannot do this -- but at the time of grid, these were not "in" things. So, any kind of amalgamation of these two can be visualised without violating any fundamental principle!

In simple words, any enivroment in computer world can be split to one of the following: (individual "single computer", cluster "collection of computers may be"2---200" share with other about all the fasilities such as lap", Grid collection of clusters share with the fasilities, server may be"300---10000" such as many menesteries or fix envieroments" and finaly cloud is collection of all the above or dynamically, fast , more cost eniveroment

Grid computing system is a widely distributed resource for a common goal. It is Brother of Cloud Computing and Sister of Supercomputer. We can think the grid is a distributed system connected to a single network. This types of computing work with the large volume of files. Basically, it is a cluster types system. So people call it cluster computing.

Source: https://www.cloudwebhostingtips.com/grid-computing-vs-cloud-computing-supercomputer/

Grid computer tends to be more geographically disperse and heterogeneous by nature. Grid network also has various types. A single grid is like dedicated connection but a common grid perform multiple tasks.

The size of the grid is large. So grid computing is like supercomputing. It consists of many network, computer, and middleware. Grid computer is dedicated to some specific function of the large volume of data. In the grid process, each task divided into a various process. All the process starts execution simultaneously on a different computer. As a result, very few seconds needs to execute and enjoy the flavor of supercomputing.

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