Dr. Gentzsch compared the Grid to the current use of the Internet. Contrary to the Internet, which provides a network of static compute and data resources flowing from producer to consumer, the Grid is a self-adaptable, self-healing network of resources that can be programmed to perform specific tasks such as a complex computer simulation for instance.

Sofar, the Grid computing evolution has evolved in three waves, according to the speaker. Grid computing was born out of the high-performance and distributed computing area in the 1990s. At present, we can distinguish the Research Wave, the Business Wave, and the Consumer Wave.

The Research Wave started in the mid nineties with projects such as I-WAY and the Information Power Grid in the United States, Uniform Access to Computing Resources or UNICORE in Europe, and NINF in Asia. Today, Grid middleware such as the Globus Toolkit, has already entered the third generation. Testbeds are being built at universities and in companies to run complex Grid-enabled applications. The Global Grid Forum has contributed a lot to the global standardization via user experiences and implementation guidelines, explained Dr. Gentzsch.

The Business Wave started some two years ago with enterprise users and technology vendors becoming aware of the benefits of Grid computing including remote access, improved resource utilization, collaboration in virtual organisations, and increased productivity. Some successful examples of distributed resource management software are Load Sharing Facility (LSF), Portable Batch System (PBS), Sun Grid Engine, Globus, Avaki, Unicore, and so on. In addition, vendors have initiated Grid projects to reduce cost and enhance efficiency in the enterprise datacentre.

In April 2004, the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA), a consortium of vendors and enterprises, has been established with a pragmatic focus on the adoption and deployment of Grid standards and technologies for business solutions. They have just released the first version of an enterprise Grid reference architecture. Dr. Gentzsch added that the Globus Consortium has been founded in January 2005 by HP, IBM, Intel, Sun, and Univa, to support the business acceptance, commercialization and implementation of the Globus Toolkit.

The Consumer Wave is now about to emerge, according to the speaker. Therefore a strong and healthy global Grid community will be required, driven by the joint interest, dedication, and working commitments to build the next-generation IT infrastructure for research, government, industry, and consumers.

The Global Grid Forum, in collaboration with IETF for Internet standards, DMTF for distributed management standards, OASIS for e-business standards, WS-I for web services interoperability, and W3C for interoperability, needs to create standards to generate interoperable Grids that are fit for robust communication. Recently, a strong collaboration of GGF with these standards organisations led to a joint agreement and specification of widely agreed web services standards for Grid technology components, stated Dr. Gentzsch.

An enterprise Grid can be built out in two phases, the speaker explained. The first phase is to optimize the resources that already exist within the departments. The second phase optimizes the overall enterprise environment through central management by adding central services, based on the concept of server consolidation. The benefits of an enterprise Grid are easy access; resource virtualization by enabling access to compute and data services and not the servers themselves; on demand computing; resource sharing; failover through which applications can be migrated and restarted or continued automatically; heterogeneity; and resource utilization.

Dr. Gentzsch admitted that Grid computing is still in its infancy meaning that there are some important hurdles to overcome such as the building up of security policies and standards, the problem of return on investment, the open source challenge; and legal issues.

The speaker mentioned a number of Grid case studies, currently underway in Europe, Japan, and the United States. The European Commission has been and still is very active in promoting Grid research by funding projects such as the European Data Grid, GridLab, EuroGrid, CrossGRID, and DataTag in the Fifth Framework Programme and Grid infrastructure technology initiatives such as CoreGrid, NextGrid, Akogrimo, and Simdat in the Sixth Framework Programme. In addition, GridCoord has been established to support the co-ordination of the national Grid programmes.

the UK e-Science Programme is building a national network of regional Grid centres, developing generic Grid middleware, supporting e-Science projects, and collaborating in international projects. Germany started as early as 1996 with the development of UNICORE and is now investing part of the 100 million euro from the German e-Science programme in the development of D-Grid, a nationwide general Grid research infrastructure and Grid services initiative. Other European countries, such as France, Italy, The Netherlands, are developing their own Grid programmes. For Europe, the Grid is a big step forward to build the Cyberinfrastructure for a united research community. It is a co-ordinated, single economic engine preparing to compete with Asia and the United States.

Japan's National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) is a 5-year Grid research and development project started in 2003, and funded by the Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, Science and Technology (MEXT), to develop a Grid software system as the prototype for future Grid infrastructure in scientific research in Japan, and to provide a testbed to prove that the high-end Grid computing environment can be practically utilized in nano-science simulations over the ultra-high-speed Science Information Network (Super SINET), stated Dr. Gentzsch.

In the States, MCNC and North Carolina universities, in partnership with Cisco Systems, IBM, and Sun Microsystems, in 2001 launched the North Carolina BioGrid, one of the nation's first Grid testbeds for life sciences research. This Grid offers a reference platform for developing the high-performance computing, data storage, and networking resources needed for bioinformatics and cheminformatics applications. The testbed currently involves resources from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, Duke University, and MCNC. In 2003, MCNC launched its Enterprise Grid to address the needs of a broader range of scientific disciplines and to provide resources for the N.C. BioGrid and the statewide Grid, according to the speaker.

Dr. Gentzsch is convinced that with other applications added to the Grid, we will be able to build any kind of information or computing or Web service, delivered in the form of a utility, or application service provisioning, or peer-to-peer computing, or complex, federated Web Services. Therefore, we need to continuously work on one common, unifying architecture for Grid computing and on common standards and protocols for making all the Grid building blocks interoperable. Dr. Gentzsch expected that most of the technology issues will be solved by 2010.