Grid Meter | January 2007

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January 2007

January 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

In an interesting bit of news today out of the United Arab Emirates, Kodak highlights new additions to its CARESTREAM Radiology Solutions. From the article:

Kodak's newest PACS (picture archiving and communications system) platform will support workflow grid computing, which facilitates storage and retrieval of information throughout an enterprise with a shared infrastructure that can serve multiple sites.

A bit closer to home

Stephan G. Erberich, details the MEDICUS project, a Globus Incubator project for radiology data distribution and medical image archiving.

The thing that I really liked to hear, and it was reflected in both of these stories, is that it is not just about speeding up a computational process, and it's not just about moving and sharing data, it's about workflow, and making a process that encompasses several, often amorphously defined tasks, work better. One of the perceived weakness of Grid, in that it is difficult to define, may very well make it well suited to workflow processes that are often just as difficult to define.

Stephan G. Erberich encapsulates this very well when he says:

And you have to understand, radiology it's not only a science, but it's also an art, so every radiologist prefers to have his own set of tools to read images.

It's very difficult to define workflow in an artistic sense, but at least in the case of MEDICUS, it is an application that Grid seems to be well suited for.

I keep harping on finding that killer commercial application for Grid. Radiology, and it's associated suite of applications coupled with an integrated workflow makes a pretty good case.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 29, 2007 11:57 AM

January 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Care and Feeding of your Grid

I found this IBM Developer Works article on Day-to-day tasks for a grid administrator pretty interesting.

Most of what one finds in the day to day Grid press are articles building a case for their use, or even one with tips and tricks on building a Grid. This article was different in that it walks through common tasks that a Grid administrator might do throughout the day to make sure that his or her Grid is running in its most efficient capacity.

Sure, the previous articles in this series walked trough Grid design and deployment, but I really liked the nonchalant tone of this article in assuming that deployed and running Grids are commonplace.

How long before we se "Grid Administrator" as a common title on business cards.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 26, 2007 08:17 AM

January 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)

What's Next for this Friend of Grid?

Cnet news reports and indeed Irving Wladawsky-Berger himself confirms that after 37 years he will be moving on. Irving Wladawsky-Berger has been a long time friend to Grid in general, and the Globus Toolkit in particular. I don't think that either would be where they are today without his hand shepherding this technology within a company that was high-tech before that adjective existed.

As he mentions in his blog he was much sought after to serve on various boards and committees of organizations that define the cutting edge of computation and telecommunications. I suspect with retirement from IBM, those types of involvement will only increase.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 25, 2007 07:31 AM

January 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

iPhone - gPhone - Embedded Grid?

A fair amount of time has passed since the initial iPhone chatter so I figure I'll throw in my two cents too.

First off a disclaimer. I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy, I drank the Mac cool-aid and now rarely run a piece of hardware or software that doesn't start with "i" or "Power". I have nothing against Windows, but found myself needing a Unix type environment with compilers and command lines. I got tired of dual booting and running VMs, so off to the glass walled stores where all the employees dress like Steve Jobs I went.

To me the real story in iPhone craze is not the fact that Apple is dipping it's toes into the phone market, nor the "boy have we patented it" user interface. The real story to me is the fact that we will soon have OS X running on an embedded device. I do feel a bit silly using the term embedded device with something that touts 8GB of storage space, but if it fits in a shirt pocket I think embedded device can be safely applied.

The big question is how long before we start seeing OS X work its way into automobile dashboards, and microwave oven panels? And this could really be where the wiz bang user interface, stirring on proliferation, comes into play.

So what does this have to do with Grid?

While certainly not the darling of the mainstream Grid media, Apple does indeed have their own recipe for clustering called Xgrid. In fact, if you are running Tiger, in the Sharing dialog in the System Preferences menu, there it is, just a check box away.

When the iPhone hits the stores I'm sure there will be lines out the door waiting to hand over credit cards and sign near term mobile phone contract lives away to the next black sweater and blue jean clad sales associate.

While I'm not one for camping out in front of stores, I can't guarantee that I won't follow shortly thereafter. If I do I'm sure my subconscious will be rationalizing that this may be one way to take a step closer to my dream of a commercially viable embedded Grid.

Maybe if Cisco doesn't relinquish rights to the trademark they can call it gPhone instead. Hmmm... I wonder if Oracle thought to trademark that?

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 18, 2007 08:27 AM

January 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization Resource

In a previous post, I mentioned an IBM Developer Works article that might help you sort out the different meanings of the virtualization alphabet soup.

If you are so inclined I'd also like to point out Tim Feeman's Virtualization and Grid Computing blog. If you want to keep your finger on the absolute latest in virtualization you'll make this a frequent stop.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 15, 2007 01:41 PM

January 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Core Components or Core Functionality

In an interesting twist on the distilling down of Grid into SOA and virtualization components, is this CIO Insight case study, Inside eBay's Innovation Machine.

From the article:

The software that powers eBay's operations - and that supports third-party applications - allows interaction with any type of user application. "If you can't split it, you can't scale it," says Eric Billingsley, head of eBay Research Labs. "We've made ourselves masters of virtualization. The more horizontal you can take a system, the less costly it is to operate." When it comes to hardware and software, "it's all about splitting so you can scale individual applications separately," he says.

He uses terms such as "virtualization" and "service-oriented architecture" to mean basically the same thing: splitting up large chunks of technology, such as servers, applications, etc., to make them look like one large service. "Virtualization or SOA hides the complexity of how the services are managed and allows for increased scalability. Search is an example from eBay - it is split across multiple servers and applications, but it looks like one single service to the outside user," Billingsley says.

It's not the core components that really matter, but the core functionality, whatever you want to call it, for your particular application. This leads me to believe that this distillation process we are seeing is the result of people actually doing real work with grids (or whatever you want to call them). This is a very good sign.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 5, 2007 07:35 AM

January 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Breaking Grid Down

In the December 2006 issue of my other outlet for creative writing, the Globus Consortium Journal, I referenced a prediction I made earlier in the year. In fact, in the November 2006 issue I was "called out" a bit on this prediction by the cadre of analysts we interviewed.

My prediction was that this was a make or break year for Grid. As a subscriber to the Michael Gold school of thought (Jeff Goldblum's character in the Big Chill), I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. Hence I was able to rationalize my way out of that prediction by saying that I still think it was a "break year", but not in the sense of a bust. What we saw over the past year, and this was reflected in our conversations with analysts and past Globus Consortium Journal contributors alike, was the breaking down of Grid, and a resulting proliferation of Grid's component technologies. Two specific technologies that were mentioned were virtualization and Grid as complex SOA conglomerates that run and scale transactional Web applications.

Well, it seems that there were a few folks out there who agreed with me.

As a big fan of William Fellows and Steve Wallage. They put it this way:

As grid technology gets absorbed into enterprise fabrics, it could become inseparable from technologies such as virtualization and service-oriented architectures (SOA) and the creation of enterprise utilities.

And, although I am wary of labeling that which is supposed to foster progress as a "disruptive technology", David Strom in InformationWeek includes Web Services and Server Virtualization among five disruptive technologies to watch in 2007.

Speaking of the latter, "virtualization" in and of itself is a technological buzz word that will also be undergoing some "break down" over the following year. In this IBM Developer Works article, M. Tim Jones does just that. If you find the term virtualization confusing, this article will certainly clear things up.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 3, 2007 12:19 PM

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