This section describes some of the more important goals of a Grid system. The Grid carries with it many ideas central to other sharing technologies, such as the network operating system (NOS), and cluster computing. A common aim among these technologies is to maintain a single system image. Such a system would run across multiple machines, allowing its users to reasonably think they were using only one machine, when in fact they are accessing resources on any of the connected machines (Biswas, Lazar, Huard, Lim, Mahjoub, Pau, et al., 1998).
Design and implementation of a single system image operating system for ad hoc networks