New Scientist Tech’s recent article, Intelligent Sensors Watch for Impending Flood, highlights the use of a small dedicated grid comprised of CPUs on
the sensors themselves communicating via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Greg Pawrocki points out in his blog though, that this grid probably doesn’t meet one of the more accepted deffinitions of a grid, Ian Foster’s 2002 three point checklist from his article “What is a Grid“.

Lately web hosters have begun marketing themselves as grid as well. Clearly, we’re seeing a trend. IMHO, grid computing no longer belongs to the HPC academic community that developed it. The mass market is asking for it. If that’s true, then we need a new definition for grid - a new checklist. Ian’s work was insightful at the time, but a lot has happened in four years.