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The grid is a reality now, examples are SETI@HOME, where 3.800.000 PCs are running, the Bio Grid, the Meteo Grid and Unicore. Then he defined Grid Computing following Foster and Kesselman as a flexible, secure, controlled common usage of resources between dynamic groups of individuals or institutions named "virtual organisations".
A resource is a unit that one can share, not necessarily a physical resource, e.g. processors, memory, storage systems; data; applications. There are two roles in the grid, the one who offers services and the consumer. Actually one can find non-commercial usage, in academic, universities and reserach, the commercial field covers professional service providers, ASP (Application Service Provider), ISP (Internet ..) or computer centres.
e-utilities
The basic idea is that the e-utility consumer gets his IT out of a socket. He plugs in and accesses CPU power, storage and applications via the Internet. This is a way to commercialise the grids. It is secure and always available - autonomic computing; there are standards, simple and dynamic access, OGSA, web services - e-utility dynamic provisioning services.
The last aspect are the EURO/Kwh, the usage based accounting - the e-utility business services (contracting, accounting, metering, billing services). The autonomic grid has the features self-configuring, self-optimising, self-healing, and self-protecting. These are key-features which IBM name in his eServer systems, e.g. the zSeries mainframes.
Werner Ederer described the e-utility infrastructure and the work flow from the tender, the contract up to using the IT infrastructure and the billing. He gave an example of web serving today. Each of the customers has its own IT infrastructure, the finance company in the USA, a news radio in Europe and a mail order house in Japan. The load distribution is not predictable thus they have to keep up to 40 times more power than necessary. The web serving on-demand needs less extra capacity and offers more flexibility.
In the evolutionary development in the IT, Werner Ederer expects a new level, which offers in the autonomic area dynamic, policy-based management, in the grid arena company overlapping Extra and Intra Grids, and on the utilities side business process utilities.
Application Specific Grids
Today each branch of industry has its own examples of grid applications: automotive, crash tests, finance, finance and risk simulations, petrol and energy, seismic analysis, fluid flow and reservoir simulation, pharma and medicine, genetic analysis, genome simulation. There are datagrids with Federated Database Technology, e.g. John Deere and Company use IBM DB2 DataJoiner, over 2.5 Million data records available (DB2 for OS/390, Oracle, MS SQL Server. Pharmaceutics enterprises use DB2 Discovery Link, connecting distributed data across continents, no usage of data warehousing, and integration of different data types.
Soon, in the second step, the industry standards allow a broader usage of the grid, OGSA from Global Grid Forum. The autonomic computing is responsible for the self-management, self-healing, self-configuring, self-optimising, disaster recovery, workload management, security, automated setup, clustering. The on-demand-computing offers services as needed, utility computing (offering standardised IT services), in Intranets and by service providers, and pay by use.
The third step, and Werner Ederer thinks this will come faster than we think, is on-demand everywhere. OGSA will become part of all servers, clients and middleware. There will be different OGSA implementations by IBM, Microsoft or the Open Source but all following the standards. This can be compared with MPI (Message Passing Interface), where each vendor has its optimised version.
The other trend, on-demand computing conquers traditional computing centres, big computer centres will be virtualised. An example is the cancer research, SETI@HOME, FOLDING@HOME is just the beginning. The last topic is the power of the distributed computing, IBM has a comparable capacity of 8 ASCI White computers on PCs, how much is in the Internet? Kazaa has more than 3 PetaByte memory on PCs in the Internet, online Gaming is just starting, but uses hundred thousands of servers.
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