ICE - Object Grid

Grid computing was born to solve extreme problems using combined power of many servers. Later it came to enterprise in two major forms: computational grids and in memory data grids. First ones were aimed to solve heavy computational problems, anothers' goal was to provide fast and convenient access to large amounts of data by storing it in memory.

But it turned out, that people often needed to solve complex computation problems, which required fast access to a large amount of data. So, they needed to combine these technologies. This was pretty clear for grid providers, so many popular compute grids, like GridGain and DataSynapse, provided functionality to store data in memory in a distributed way. On the other side, many popular data grids, like Oracle Coherence and GigaSpaces, provided features to run parallel computations. However, they still played their own role better: compute grid had better functionality to run distributed computations than data grid, and vice versa. In some cases this problem was solved by maintaining two grid installations: compute grid, running parallel computations, used data grid, where the data for these computations were stored.

Anyway, one problem remained: computations may run on server, different from the server, where the data for this computation is stored. Each vendor tries to solve this problem by providing its own data-aware routing techniques. In case of using multiple grid tools, this required additional efforts.

Recently, one interesting framework, called ICE, have appeared on the horizon. It is a pretty general framework and in a couple of words, it looks like CORBA on steroids. Based on this tool, there is a grid solution, called IceGrid. This grid stores data and computations in the same place in the form of objects (remember, this is just like CORBA). From the documentation it looks like that load balancing, replication, and other important grid-related stuff is in place. This product also has a number of significant installations in a real heavy loaded and highly scalable environments. So, at least, it worth learning.

I do not think that object oriented approach is a killer feature for the world of large-scale systems. For many heavy tasks it is better and clearer to have logic and data separated. But maybe for some tasks, IceGrid's approach will be better.