Peer-to-Peer

What'd you feel? I felt the Grid as a ``peer-to-peer'' environment. One could think of cases in which the client and server in a client-server environment each have about the same computing resources and each call on one another about the same number of times. A popular example of just such a situation today is instant messager. You and your buddy each have an instant messager client and each can blab to the other about whatever they see fit, see figure , but neither you nor your buddy's computer is particularly dominate in the conversation. The instant messager clients are acting as peers in this interaction, thus the name peer-to-peer.