ABSTRACT
A new option for delivering high-performance computing (HPC) cycles has been evolving. Cloud computing has become a factor in the HPC ecosystem that is worth looking into. Concurrently, also unrelated to HPC, communication giants, social network companies, and online content providers showed the world that present technologies – processors, network, storage, power consumption management, make it possible to construct very large datacenters. National centers, government labs and universities, provide HPC cycles to thousands of researchers; some of them globally. Grid Computing enables both remote and multi-site access to HPC cycles. This chapter considers the similarities and the differences between HPC's Grid computing and Cloud computing. Both deliver compute cycles to remote users. The big difference is that Cloud delivers from a facility under a single management, where as Grid established collaborative processing among multiple domains, allowing variety of architectures.
