Again affected by my timetable changes I missed the first lecture on this subject. Apperently the MUSO system is still being used here so it took some tracking down but did manage to find the subjects resources. Unit resources: http://users.monash.edu.au/~asadk/units/fit5164/, see MUSO for username and password.
A quick summary from the lecture notes of lecture 1:
Unit leader: Dr Asad Khan
Grids enable ‘On-Demand’ computing, examples of grids are P2P networks and clusters. From my understanding at this point they key is shared computing resources. Some basic definition and information can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing. A question that came to mind when reading the introductory material is the difference between cloud computing and grid computing? A good response to this question can be found here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-cloudgrid/. In essence, cloud computing goes a bit further than grid computing by dynamically allocating resources on demand.