It's tough to rationalize why Grid groups have been so divisive recently, drawing a line in the sand between research/academia and enterprise -- inferring (if not saying directly) that the Grid breakthroughs in e-science somehow do not match up to the rigorous requirements of enterprise Grids.

To point to e-Science and academic Grids and call them niche experiments, or to assign a higher value to one over the other -- is to turn a blind eye to the history of IT. Some of enterprise IT's most mainstream technologies today were born in academic / science circles. When Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack figured out how to make different computers talk to each other across the Stanford campus, the result was the commercial router (and the birth of networking behemoth, Cisco). When major universities (UCSB, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB and UCLA) connected computers in the ARPA project in the late '60s, little did they know the effort was an important link in the evolution towards the commercial Internet we all know today.

In 1997, The Economist quipped that the now late John Postel (networking pioneer working out of ISI) and his academic colleagues were ill-equipped to handle the commercial evolution of the Internet. The concluding remarks of the article: "But perhaps the main lesson for the Internet is that it is time to abandon amateurism. For all their expertise, neither Mr. Postel nor most of the members of the IAHC have the resources (nor, indeed, the mandate) to dictate the Net's future course. Many are volunteers with full-time jobs. This was fine when the Net was largely an academic tool. Now, though, it is commercial. And commerce needs the service of professionals." Needless to say, that particular opinion did not sit well with the early pioneers of the Internet. And indeed, the Internet has continued to grow and prosper under this supposedly "amateur" management model.

To quote the great Yogi Berra -- it's like deja vu all over again.

Here we are, almost 10 years later, and again, question marks are being raised about research / science's ability to usher a technology (developed within research / science) into the supposedly "more rigorous" requirements of the enterprise. In some cases, the shadow of uncertainty is just an extension of an age-old rivalry between technologists in research / science and technologists in enterprise. But in other cases, it's a malicious sort of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that's often being perpetuated by groups with their own economic interests in Grid, to scare potential enterprise users off of open source (such as the Globus Toolkit) and to steer them towards proprietary Grid solutions that they can profit directly from. The common nerve they like to hit is that security, performance and quality of service requirements in enterprise are higher than those same requirements in research and academia.

"It's an unfair oversimplification to say that the enterprise has somehow more constraining requirements than universities do," said Charlie Catlett, TeraGrid's director, and former chair of the Global Grid Forum. "We certainly are in different businesses, and we have more freedom to experiment with some things, but that is not to say that we don't also have production requirements that we have to meet just as industry does. By not focusing on trying to differentiate between research and enterprise Grid requirements, and by not creating that sort of divisiveness... we're going to make much better progress with Grid."

In the U.K., e-Science and enterprise Grid professionals have established more of a harmony that we should perhaps aspire to here in the U.S. There, the National e-Science Centre does a lot of joint funding with the UK Department of Trade and Industry -- and as a result have produced some compelling commercial-level Grid projects in which e-Science and enterprise Grid professionals work together.

One compelling example has been the construction of a Grid for the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC). The BBC has a compute center in most capitals of the world today -- wherever they have journalists. Their vision was that any field reporter should have access to any of BBC's compute resources [via satellite] as if they were sitting in the London office. So the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry partnered with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to finance a BBC Grid -- built by the Belfast e-Science Centre.

Today, the BBC's Grid (and the Gridcast program) not only helps the media conglomerate deal with large file transfers (a single hour of broadcasting can be as large as 280 gigs) -- but serves as an integration fabric that allows the company to tie together many different platforms and to deploy software in an open manner. The open source Globus Toolkit serves as the middleware / plumbing in BBC's Grid.

"The future of Belfast e-Science will be as a self funding Grid R&D entity with a number of commercial spin-out companies," said Terry Harmer, Technical Director at the Belfast e-Science Centre.

So while it's become en vogue to discount e-Science Grids as niche experiments -- the truth is that many leading organizations today are quietly harnessing the knowledge of e-Science Grid professionals and applying their expertise to challenging environments in enterprise. These companies aren't beating the PR drums, because publicity's not their priority. They're interested in competitive advantage, and see Grid as a means to an end -- a smarter way to run their IT infrastructure.

Enterprise has only begun to tap into research / academia's Grid expertise. Don't let the e-Science Grid FUD fool you.

Grid pioneer Ian Foster is a board member at the Globus Consortium.

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