About a year ago, an IT analyst told me, "With all due respect to Globus -- having read the technical documents -- it's very clear to me that the Grid architecture is designed by people who really don't understand networking - and just assume that their networking peers are going to figure out what the application requirements of Grid are and will figure it out."

While the statement's a little harsh / overstated -- it's largely true that networking and Grid communities aren't exactly joined at the hip. There are certainly some long-standing Grid networking efforts and substantial results being achieved (Franco Travostino's group at Nortel Networks and work within the GGF for example), but it seems to me that networking discussions around Grid are still truly at their infancy. Every time I meet someone from the networking realm, I poke and prod for information about the network-specific challenges and directions for Grid computing ... and I typically get a lot of blank looks.

But that doesn't mean that the challenges don't exist, or that Grid won't have a profound influence on the future of networking (and vice-versa). To me, what that means is that the networking industry is still warming up to Grid. The networking world has taken more of a wait-and-see approach to Grid computing, but it's really interesting to observe how (nearly overnight), "Grid" has crept its way into so many networking players' product descriptors and company boilerplates.

With the addition of newest Globus consortium member, Cisco Systems, the GCJ editors considered it a no-brainer to revisit Grid networking themes for this month's newsletter. Cisco Systems has been working closely with Grid computing (in R&D, as well as in numerous real-world deployments) for a number of years. In this issue of GCJ, Cisco explains the role of Infiniband in Grid architectures, highlights some common misperceptions about Grid networking requirements ... and even explains "Factoring Lower Network Layers Into the Grid."

I for one am thrilled to have Cisco on board. For anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of the Internet, it's well-established how vital the company's products and education were to the commercialization of the Internet. And to me, that the company is officially contributing to the enterprise directions of the Globus Toolkit -- and rallying behind an open source, open standards approach to enterprise Grid computing -- is especially significant.

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