Grid as the Fourth Stage of Computing Development

Computing today has entered into the fourth stage of its development. The first was related with appearance of large computers (mainframes), second - with appearance of the personal computers, third - with appearance of the Internet which has united users into single informative village by providing joint access to information. With beginning of XXI age a transition to new grid-technology began, when the Internet with Web service is changed to the world Grid network which is geographically distributed infrastructure, compels existing in a network computers (thousand of PC, work stations and supercomputers) to work how a sole enormous and mighty computer is, uniting the great number of resources of different types (processors, large memories, data depositories and data bases, networks), access to which users can get from any points, regardless of place of their location. Grid assumes the collective mode of access to the resources and to related to them services of the within the framework globally distributed virtual organizations, that consist of enterprises and separate specialists which jointly use shareable resources.