The Grid is a twentyfirst century time machineHeidelberg 22 jun 2002 In his introduction to the Grid Session at ISC2002, in Heidelberg, Wolfgang Gentzsch described the Grid as the Time Machine of this century.
The Grid, which originated from the needs of large organisations as CERN, with a need of making massive resources available to researchers Europe wide, and analysis immense amounts of data. Years or research in meta computing, job management and networking and lots of other technology, could then be glued together in an overal system called The Grid.
For industrial Grid applications, Gentszh pointed out there are several parts that have to all work together to provide workable Grids. Or in his formula:
Gentszh notes there are still some road blocks ahead.
Despite the fact network infrastructure is growing fast, for enterprizes in for instance Europe, it can still be rather expensive to fully deploy cross-site Grids. There is also still a lack of standards, also work is going on in taht area. Third, there are mental firewalls. Firewall around departments, firewalls around enterprizes. These have to be overcome for before people can realis the full potential of the Grid.
A trend is also that today, commercial and technical applications are converging towards one Grid technology set.
What stays the same is the ultimate goal of the Grid: being a utility, despite the complexity of the application. You get what you need, when you need it and
you do not care where it comes from, and how. Also you pay as you go, and only for what you used.
Of course, Gentszch considers the Sun Grid Engine as a way to already realise small scale utities. It executes jobs on best suited, least loaded systems in a seamless, transparent and secure way.
Gentszch concluded by comparing great inventions from different centuries that did help is saving time to people:
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