Grid Meter » Taking a Read of the "Grid Gauge"

October 05, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Taking a Read of the "Grid Gauge"

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There was an interesting "Ask Slashdot" posting recently on Slashdot. In a nutshell, the person posting the question works for a large investment bank and was being pushed to use Grid technology. The question this person was posing was "To Grid or Not To Grid?".

In typical Slashdot fashion, especially as it pertains to the Ask Slashdot category, the responses were varied, some tongue in cheek, and application of intelligent filtering always advisable.

Two of the things that did strike me about the responses were 1) There is still a confusion about exactly what "Grid" means; and 2) that there were very few "Grid is a pipe dream" comments, but instead the emphasis was along the lines of "Grid is real, but it ain't easy". The reason that these points resonated with me is that I just recently completed compiling my survey from GlobusWORLD / GridWorld 2006 and that my data was showing some of the same trends.

In my past two years of surveys I have asked the question "Do you feel there is confusion regarding the term 'Grid computing'?" Over the last two years those responding to my surveys have stayed pretty much consistent at 60% saying "yes" and 40% saying "no". The stated concerns echoed the Slashdot article and had mainly to do with the confusion between what is Grid and what is Clustering and confusion between related terms such as Grid and Virtualization.

I've also noticed a trend over the past year that my survey respondents have become less concerned with issues of software stability and increasingly concerned with the difficulty of implementing and administrating a Grid solution.

I'm certainly not going to defend my read of Slashdot as statistical science, however I believe we are indeed seeing the first steps toward mainstream acceptance of Grid. While we may not all agree what "Grid" means, we aren't so much concerned if it will work, but how straight forward it is going to be to get it deployed.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on October 5, 2006 12:39 PM

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