From the proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'03), “On Death, Taxes, and the Convergence of Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing” compares the two current popular incarnations of distributed computing technology, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Grid Computing. It also predicts the convergence of the two technologies:
“The complementary nature of the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches suggests that the interests of the two communities are likely to grow closer over time.”
This paper is worth reading if you want to clear up the marketing cloud that surrounds these two technologies and sometimes makes them hard to distinguish. For example, the recent announcement by Sony that they will use a Butterfly.net grid as the infrastructure for their massively multiplayer games generated some confusion on Slashdot: many people thought that the actual consoles would be linked together to form a huge network. But this would clearly involve massively scalable, decentralized P2P technologies, not Grid technologies. What the announcement really means, is that Sony will run the server side of the multiplayer games on a Butterfly.net grid, running on IBM hardware. This will free the server developers from having to deal with scalability issues.