The Information Technology (IT) Vocabulary Builder series aims to deliver a very concise summary of a currently relevant topic to Information Professionals.  It is done mostly by collecting a small number of highly relevant web links to save you the time of combing through search results yourself.  It differs from sites such as Wikipedia because it includes opinions, forecasts, and detractions in addition to just facts.

Wikipedia provides this quote to get you started:

"Fabric computing or unified computing involves the creation of a computing fabric consisting of interconnected nodes that look like a ‘weave’ or a ‘fabric’ when viewed collectively from a distance.

Usually this refers to a consolidated high-performance computing system consisting of loosely coupled storage, networking and parallel processing functions linked by high bandwidth interconnects (such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet …) but the term has also been used to describe platforms like the Azure Services Platform and grid computing in general (where the common theme is interconnected nodes that appear as a single logical unit).

The fundamental components of fabrics are "nodes" (processor(s), memory, and/or peripherals) and "links" (functional connection between nodes).”

fabric 

Fabric computing is a way to produce a massively powerful computational computer by forming a grid of processors that all can access the same memory and storage.  It is especially powerful when combined with the concepts of cloud computing and the nearly limitless potential for massive, virtual scaling of computational power.  Due to its low cost, high availability, and easy understandability, it most likely represents the near-term future for business class supercomputing.

Some other resources to speed your learning that I uncovered include:

"Because of the scale of the server environment, with hundreds or even thousands of servers, small changes can have significant effects. Multi-core computing and virtualization technologies are rapidly changing the data center landscape, promoting the need for higher-bandwidth, lower-latency switching. Increasingly dense, rack-mount and blade servers running multiple virtualized environments place increased power and cooling demands on data center architectures. Virtualization enables higher utilization levels, and with higher utilization comes increasing demand for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, server clustering network connectivity to each server and blade. Fortunately, even modest improvements to total cost of investment (TCO), energy efficiency, and complexity can have a significant cumulative effect on the data center."

"The Development Fabric is facilitated via a series of running processes that simulate load balancing and hosting your application."

"The fabric based server of the future will treat memory, processors and I/O cards are components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suit the owner’s needs."

Like most of the IT Vocabulary words, this is a trend that should be understood by information professionals.  Do you have experience with grid or fabric computing?  Do you know of any business applications?  Please share your knowledge with us.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for September 15, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin .

Image credit: skiptomylou.org

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