Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML and high profile blogger, has posted a useful overview of alternatives for Grid Computing, including:
- MPI (Message Passing Interface)
- MapReduce
- Sun Grid Engine
- OSGA (which is based on Web services and the Web Services Resource Framework, WSRF)
- The Jini-based Rio
- Gridbus
Not only is my antipathy to the WS-* suite well-known, but the specs clustering around WSRF have always struck me as particularly offensive, since on the face of it they seem to re-implement HTTP (badly) on top of SOAP on top of HTTP.