thumb|right|Layout of a grid low-voltage network
A grid network is a computer network consisting of a number of computer systems connected in a grid topology.
In a regular grid topology, each node in the network is connected with two neighbors along one or more dimensions. If the network is one-dimensional, and the chain of nodes is connected to form a circular loop, the resulting topology is known as a ring. Network systems such as FDDI use two counter-rotating token-passing rings to achieve high reliability and performance. In general, when an n-dimensional grid network is connected circularly in more than one dimension, the resulting network topology is a torus, and the network is called "toroidal". When the number of nodes along each dimension of a toroidal network is 2, the resulting network is called
a hypercube.
A parallel computing cluster or multi-core processor is often connected in regular interconnection network such as a
de Bruijn graph,
a hypercube graph,
a hypertree network,
a fat tree network,
a torus, or cube-connected cycles.
A grid network is not the same as a grid computer or a computational grid, although the nodes in a grid network are usually computers, and grid computing requires some kind of computer network or "universal coding" to interconnect the computers.
See also
- Grid plan - street network
- Network topology