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April 24, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Grid 2.0 discussions premature ...

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Tom Gibbs from Intel has an interesting write-up on GRIDtoday that draws comparisons between Web 1.0 / Web 2.0 and what we've seen thus far from the Grid, versus what we will see with "Grid 2.0."

He says (get the full version at GRIDtoday):

"I think that the Grid community is going through a similar metamorphosis from "Grid 1.0," which was born on the Web in the early 1990s along with Web 1.0. Interestingly, many of the same folks and the organizations they worked for were involved with the birth of both. The benchmark application for Web 1.0 is Netscape, which had its roots in Mosaic, which was developed at NCSA. Similarly, the benchmark application for Grid 1.0 is Globus, which has its roots with the distributed computing project at Argonne National Laboratory. Maybe it's the water in Illinois.

As with Web 1.0 evolving to Web 2.0, the fundamental concepts remain the same. It is a natural evolution that is happening in a very organic way, largely stimulated by the open source community. The focus of Web 1.0 for the ISV was still to sell software or specialized services and provide access to the Web. With Web 2.0, the ISV is selling a service, and the Web is packaged as part of the service. Similarly, Grid 1.0 included a vision along with the basic building blocks for ubiquitous computing and communications, but its focus was on sharing compute cycles. Grid 2.0 will usher in a new world of distributed ubiquitous virtual computing, networking and storage in the enterprise that will allow a whole raft of new rich services. I started to see this coming with the demographics at SC'05 in Seattle. The scientists were being outnumbered by folks usually associated with content or content delivery."

I agree with many of Gibbs' points. But where the analogy falls short for me is that it presupposes that Grid 1.0 has actually happened. Web 2.0 discussions really got off the ground AFTER the commercial Internet had truly gelled with mainstream businesses. And before we start talking about Grid 2.0, we need to see Grid 1.0 through the final stages.

As Irving Wladawsky-Berger from IBM put it:

"If I compared Grid computing to the early days of the Internet and the Worldwide Web, I would say we are still pre-'95. Lots of people know about Grids, there are already quite a number of successful commercial pilots of Grids, and everybody in the research and supercomputing community is involved with Grids already. But the problems being tackled by Grid computing, the whole general area of distributed systems based on open standards over the Internet, is an incredibly complicated set of technical problems. So it's not surprising that it's taken time to develop the needed architectures and the needed software for Grids to be acceptable for general production use. There's lots of work being done, lots of good progress, but we are still in the development phase, in my opinion."

Grid 1.0 is still happening largely in research / science. Grid 1.0 does not yet have the pervasive enterprise use that even remotely resembles commercial Internet use in the late 90's / early 00's. Yes, there are signs that we're moving in that direction. However, IMO, Grid 2.0 is a bit of a red herring.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on April 24, 2006 08:17 AM

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