“Standard” is often equated with “average” or “boring.” How can you innovate or invent when you’re bound by standards and regulations? How can you push the boundaries when you’re stuck inside a box?
Yet how can you create something on a grand scale—something that can slot into place with other grand things—unless you create something interoperable. Something . . . standard.
In this special feature, we delve into this easily overlooked aspect of grid computing. In 1850s Australia, budding railroad tycoons began laying train tracks across the continent. Each team of financiers, surveyers and civil engineers adopted their own preferred system, independent of the others.
The result?
Australia developed horribly incompatible train lines—some had 4 feet 8 1/2 inches between the parallel rails of steel, some had 2 feet between them, some had 3 feet 6 inches . . .
By 1917, you needed to change trains six (!) times to get from Brisbane on the east coast to Perth on the west . . .
Will the same incompatibilities be true of data on a computing grid?
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