The GRIA Consortium includes six partners and is managed by the IT Innovation Centre at the University of Southampton. The other research and technology partners are the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group (IAM), also from the University of Southampton, the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), and Dolphin Interconnect Solutions from Norway.

The GRIA end users are CESI which is the company that offers the service of its widely reputed technicians to electrical utilities, electromechanical industry, electronics manufacturers and large-scale users of electricity; and KINO, a Greek digital post-production company, with specific expertise in real-time production technologies including real-time 3D rendering, and virtual studio and virtual actor-based productions.

CESI performs structural analysis in Milan where they have the computers in the house but they cannot justify owning sufficient computers to run their computations quickly. GRIA will allow them to outsource and rent their spare computing power to other companies. KINO does promotion campaigns for Coca Cola and the project will enable them to set up collaborative Grid services offering their clients secure access to promotional compositions and results.

Mr. Vesterkjaer told Primeur that GRIA is developing business models, processes and semantics for computational resource owners and users to find each other and sign deals to access high performance computing power. In this way, customers can evaluate how much to pay for the rented cluster and for the time they have used it.

Extra computational power is sometimes characterised by peaks and sometimes runs continuously. Dolphin is also offering CPU cycles that are not used by the company. Dolphin is involved in GRIA because the company indeed is deeply involved in the server and clustering business and has been engaged in several projects funded by the European Commission.

The GRIA prototype version is due for June 2004 but Mr. Vesterkjaer was already able to show the future potential which GRIA has in store for its clients. The whole process of sending enquiries and receiving offers for available CPU cycles at different suppliers' sites is controlled by certificates. No misabuse is possible and clients can run their rented CPU cycles at trusted sites. The tool is developed in parallel.

The client first receives a certificate in order to log on and enters his user name and password, as Mr. Vesterkjaer demonstrated to Primeur. He is requested to present his public key and choose from a number of applications. The system then starts looking for suppliers on the network who are willing to close a contract with the client.

Once a number of suitable suppliers have been found who can deliver a good price/performance offer, the client provides the suppliers with application-specified information and tells the other parties which version he is using. He also needs to specify specify the job he wants to run, as well as the date and time when the client wants the job to be done and when he likes to have the results. After having exchanged this data, the client sends an invitation to the suppliers.

The system processes the query while the client is waiting for responses to the invitations. The whole application is Java-based using web services. Just like in the commercial flying business, there are different types of offers, specified as economy, business, and so on. Each job is offered against a certain price. After the client has selected the job which is most convenient to him, the contract is being sent. There is also a deadline set to accept the offer.

Once the agreement closed, the job is submitted to the Dolphin cluster. Mr. Vesterkjaer noted that later versions will check the status of the job during the ongoing process. While we were waiting for the results, Mr. Vesterkjaer stated that the market for GRIA is completely new so the project members will have to figure out which business model to choose. Therefore, within GRIA different business models will be tested, since the project has to fit different needs.

After a short time, the demo output was produced. Again, Mr. Vesterkjaer used the certificate to download the results. The password automatically is produced and is being justified by the system. When everything has been checked out properly, the client can start downloading the file with the job, as Mr. Vesterkjaer demonstrated.

Primeur likes to thank the people of Dolphin for showing the first results of this GRIA Grid testbed which will largely contribute to the commercial outsourcing of computational services. More information is available at the GRIA web site.