Grid-enabling resource-intensive applications

In this article, we discuss how we took an application designed to run on a single PC and created a framework that enabled it to distribute its processing over a network grid. The original application is called "CodeMatch" and the grid version we created is "CodeGrid." CodeMatch detects software plagiarism by comparing two directories of possibly thousands of source-code files, then producing a report showing all matching patterns found (www.ddj.com/dept/architect/184405734). CodeMatch is used in court cases to help prove or disprove copyright infringement. Because its algorithms are very rigorous, they are also very time consuming, and CodeMatch can take a long time to compare large numbers of files. For this reason, we were seeking a way to speed it up and came up with the idea of a network grid for resource sharing.