This month, the GCJ focuses the discussion on some of the forward-looking Grid efforts going on today in research and enterprise.

From HP's embedded Grid research, to a look at the budding relationship between Grid and virtualization, to Grid's place in Mesoscale meteorology - this month's perspectives may be a bit non sequitur, but they do tell a story of the many moving parts to the Grid evolution. As Carl Kesselman notes this month, it can be a little tricky to monitor Grid's "amoeba-like" evolution.

I'm an old embedded systems guy by trade, and "computing doesn't really impress me, until you can squeeze it down on an embedded system." Naturally, I can't wait to see the next steps in embedded Grid computing.

In conventional data processing in the early days of IT, no one imagined that a computer would exist beyond the machine rooms of a few large companies. Now processing power that exceeds these early machines by many times can be found in our mobile phones and microwave ovens. Eventually I'm sure we will see Grid technology applied to mainstream embedded processors and consumer devices.

Cable television set top boxes could one day harness the computational power of other set top boxes on the network to do media conversion, or even access the media storage of other set tops anywhere on the network. Another area where I feel application of Grid is only a matter of time is in automotive applications. What is a car these days but a multitude of embedded processors dedicated to control and monitoring of various vehicular subsystems networked together?

My point is that we have only just begun with Grid, and that's a good thing. We'll look to these early adopters, implementers and researchers to help us imagine the possibilities of what is next.

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