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December 22, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Grid Apps - Ever Hopeful

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Earlier in the year there was some traffic in the grid press regarding who was more advanced in their Grid use, the US or Europe. I forget the conclusion, although it might have been decided that in fact Asia was more advanced...

But in this week of the focus being on the consumer, where are we in getting Grids to the masses, well at least to the Enterprise masses.

This week I saw the following press release regarding the European Network of Excellence CoreGRID, and the 3rd "GRIDS@WORK" event and Grid Plugtests. From the release:

Over 200 delegates, representing 25 countries from all over the world, came to Sophia Antipolis, France, to discuss research projects and industrial requirements towards the implementation of Grids as a key driver of tomorrow’s 'Network-of-networks'.

I think I'll lump 'Network-of-networks' in with terms like 'cyber infrastructure'. A lot of talk about what the roads will look like, but no talk about the cars (applications) that will drive on them.

And like many before them, they have turned to a contest to figure out what exactly this 'Network-of-networks' is to be used for. See: Grid Plugtests - A Contest to Demonstrate the Power of the Grid.

Now earlier this year Amazon.com thought they had the killer Grid application with their Simple Storage Service. In a nutshell, the world's biggest bookstore wanted to become the world's biggest data store. Now they plan to venture out to providing computing power, something Amazon calls EC2. As the article points out they are certainly not the first to do this, and getting it up and running seems to be a bit "open ended". From the article:

In order to use the service, you create a server image (called an Amazon Machine Image, or AMI), based on an Amazon spec. Ultimately, the server image will be able to have whatever operating system, applications, configuration, log-ins and security that you want. At the moment, it only supports the Linux kernel. Amazon also has prebuilt AMIs built that you can use as well, so that you don't have to configure them from scratch.

Sure we've got applications, you just have to load them and configure them yourself.

I'm not sure if I'll get another post in next week before the new year, so happy holidays to all. I don't know about you, but I've asked Santa for more talk about Grid applications next year.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on December 22, 2006 07:47 AM

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