Grid Meter » LAMP may be just what Grid is looking for

January 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)

LAMP may be just what Grid is looking for

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In Monday's blog I mentioned William Fellow's observation that, "If grids can find a place in one of the open source stacks, such as LAMP, it would undoubtedly help further adoption." Again, William hits the nail smack on the head.

But what does that mean? I must confess this thought has occupied my brain for the last few days. As is generally the case with grid this is going to mean many different things, but the one thing I keep coming back to is scalability.

In an interesting article this past summer a common theme through it is that LAMP is really great for a proof of concept and small scale enterprise systems, but needs quite a bit of "hands on" when applied to large enterprise systems.

In the article is a good quote by Patrick Lohr of iStockPhoto: "PHP saves me money when I'm a little business but ultimately it costs me more when I'm a big business, he complains, adding that whereas enterprise-class systems often force you into best practice, LAMP products let you hack together quick systems. We've proven that we're successful - now, how do we scale this thing?"

But scalability of what? Well, resources of course. LAMP stands for Linux/Apache/mySQL/PHP (although the "P" is often debated it is not all that relevant in this example). The two common taxonomies that we often use in discussions of Grid computing are data grids and compute grids. So in the case of LAMP, resources are compute based in the Apache application and data based in the mySQL application. Grid experts caution us not to think of data and compute Grids separately, but as one animal. LAMP may indeed be just what Grid was looking for.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 25, 2006 09:01 AM

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