Web and grids work together
Monday, June 12, 2006 09:34 AM
Grids cannot exist without the Internet and need Web standards to work, says one industry observer.
Grids need Web standards to work, and the two technologies will converge even further in the future, says the chair of the Global Grid Forum.
Grid computing links machines together across the Internet to share resources like processing power and information. While normally associated with academic computing and research, grid technologies are starting to make their way into more commercial applications. Speaking to Builder UK at the WWW2006 conference, Mark Linesch, chairman of the Global Grid Forum, said that grid has a lot in common with the Web, and that their shared technologies are part of their strength.
Linesh explained that grid technology couldn't exist without the work of groups like the W3C. "Grids rely on Web technologies and the Internet in general. All of the work that we do is predicated on the notion that there is an Internet, and a there are a set of stable and standard Web services at the infrastructure layer, on which we can built higher level grid abstractions," he said.
The work of the GGF shares many of the same aims as the W3C, said Linesh, particularly where distributed computing was concerned. "The whole industry is going through a journey from an old world of one application, one computer to a new orientation of shared infrastructure, service-oriented, virtualised and distributed computing. The GGFs and the W3Cs of this world are enablers to cross over from that old world to the new world."
It's not just the technology that's shared. Many people are involved in both areas. "We have a lot of joint members. Dave De Roure, one of the co-chairs of [WWW20006] is also the area director for our technology research," said Linesh.
The biggest use of grid technology so far has been in academia to share computing resources between researchers working in the same area. Linesh says this is unsurprising, and mirrors the Web's own progression from an academic tool to a global marketplace. "If you were to have come to this conference in its early years, what you would have seen would have been researchers and academics and scientists, because they were people using the Internet. In a similar vein, the first people using grid-like architectures come from the scientific and academic communities."
However, many commercial organisations are already looking into grid technologies in an effort to get a competitive advantage. The banking industry has used grid in its risk management systems to take advantage of massive amounts of distributed information. Pharmaceutical companies are also at the leading edge, and have been using grid for some time. "The drug and pharmaceutical industry has some large computational issues, but they also have a need for data integration. How do I take data from many places, and bring it together for analysis. Big companies like Novartis and Johnson and Johnson are on their second or third generations of grid-like structures," said Linesh.
The GGF's role in all this is to create a forum where standards can be created so that using grid technology becomes easier. "Our mission is accelerating pervasive adoption. The question is; what are the barriers to adoption, and how do we in our global community knock down those barriers?" explained Linesh. "We work on architectures and specifications. Specifications, particularly for interoperability, are crucial for broad adoption."
The GGF sees the evolution of grids from an academic curiosity to a commercial technology as happening in stages. "The first phase is as an emerging technology, and it's hand crafted. In the second phase you've got more proven solutions, industry by industry: The weather forecasters can see examples of successes, the financial analysts can see examples of successes. The third phase is broad adoption."
That's where the GGF's work is crucial, according to Linesh. "If you want to get to broad adoption, if you want to make grid-like capabilities pervasive, then you need standardization and interoperability. We do standardization."
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