Grid Computing Now! is a UK Government funded Knowledge Transfer Network project which was established in February 2005 and is now in its 3rd year. The objectives of the project are to create awareness of the potential of grid computing technologies; identify obstacles and enablers for adoption; prepare public and private sector organisations for adoption and capitalise on the potential of the UK e-Science research programme, now 7 years old. Knowledge Transfer Networks are part of the Government Technology Programme and there are 22 currently in place representing a wide variety of technologies deemed of importance to the development of the UK economy. See the DTI web site for additional details.

The project is run from the UK High Tech Trade Association, Intellect based in London, in close collaboration with colleagues from the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh and a small consultancy, CNR Ltd., based in Bristol. Our project has delivered a web-site, which features background information, user case studies, archived webinars, useful links to vendors and an events listing for the community, which has now grown in registrations beyond 700. We also run face to face events aimed at highlighting key areas of interest in the industrial adoption of grid computing. Most recently on Virtual Organisations, and shortly we have been collaborating with OGF to offer an industrial track, Grids Mean Business!, at OGF 20, May 7 to 11, 2007, in Manchester, UK.

The Grids Mean Business! Track will run on Tuesday, May 8th and Wednesday, May 9th, and will feature Paul Strong, e-Bay, as a keynote speaker, together with a selection of grid innovators and champions from the UK and around the world. The event is aimed as a showcase of grid in action and is structured to allow interested ICT professionals and business leaders to learn from their peers who are already reaping the benefits of grid computing technologies. Many of the speakers have featured in the case studies available on the Grid Computing Now! website. This is an exciting culmination of the first two years of the project and we are looking forwards to generating a real sense of "can do" led by these early adopters.

Other events at OGF 20 include the EGEE 2nd User Forum overlapping with Grids Mean Business on Wednesday, 9th and Thursday 10th. Together with the usual wide variety of standards business and knowledge exchange activities.

We have learned a number of lessons about the commercial adoption of grid during the first two years of the project. The first lesson learned was the relatively ambivalent reaction of the marketplace to the term "grid computing". Certainly, the initial perception was that this was/is of academic interest and only relevant to large scale mathematical processes - the computation grid. Our initial work really focused on helping articulate some of the key enabling technologies and features: Virtualisation; Middleware; for improved system management and flexibility. Of course, Virtualisation itself has since broken into two branches: within the box (server virtualisation) and beyond the box (infrastructure virtualisation). It is these technologies which are currently capturing the attention of the mainstream marketplace as CIO/IT Directors become aware of the potential for more efficient resource utilisation, particuarly in the new era of multi-core processors.

When we look at the marketplace by industry, it is clear that the Financial Services industry is best established - it has a ready opportunity for computation grid, and the resources to purchase on demand. Interestingly, judging by a recent meeting I attended in the City of London, they are now getting to grips with the consequences of line of business purchase of this equipment. Their islands of grid clusters and now becoming archipelagos spread across the geographies. "Follow the moon" processing is a popular way of taking advantage of this disributed infrastructure during quiet times elsewhere in their world. Pharmaceutical businesses are also big adopters, although a little less publicly sociable with each other as they fiercely protect their Intellectual Property turf. Other industries are harder to characterise with some early adoption but in the main it has been business as usual to date.

In addition to the core e-Science Research Programmes in the UK and Europe, several applied R&D projects have been funded in collaboration between industry and academia and these have led to some exciting innovations in the field of Healthcare, both treatment and infrastructure; Engineering, where there has been a widespread collaboration on design across Europe; and in other emerging areas of the Knowledge Economy, e.g. Chemical Engineering, etc... Many of these projects feature in our case studies on the web-site. There is a definite desire to innovate in the area of healthcare delivery and I get the sense that the challenge of increasing the efficiency of major state sponsored healthcare systems will continue to stretch the technologies available, our ability to develop and install such systems and, inevitably, the public purse! A recent webinar highlighted some more interesting perspectives on this, available from our web-site. Of course, Europe has several significant grid infrastructure projects, including EGEE (Enabling Grids for Essential E-Science) and the UK National Grid Service, as well as the mother of all science grid projects at CERN with the Large Hadron Collider coming on stream later this year.

So what's ahead? In the mainstream, the notion of service orientation is becoming of interest. Several companies in the Financial Services space have experimented with automating their business processes using SOA and Web Services, Cattles - a case study on our website is one, a recent case study of ING Direct another. What's critical here is the ability to design an architecture which will support the business and then to be able to model the business processes in such a way that the IT staff can deliver on the vision of putting business controls in the hands of their users. In the financial services world, folk are turning their attention to structuring their large clusters as service oriented infrastructures, potentially across organisations!, and eventually with the idea of offering market based capabilities at market prices. There is a small group in London interested in creating a generic standard for grid middleware to work towards this. Finally, there is an emerging interest, worldwide, in "Green IT" that is the more efficient utilisation of computing infrastructure for a carbon emission constrained world. Grid Computing Technologies have an important piece of this puzzle with the deployment of grid middleware to allow optimal use of resources, that is run a few servers "hot" and turn the others off! Its early days, but such thought processes coupled with multi-core processors; virtualisation; improved AC:DC conversion efficiency; redesigned smart data centres (both in operation and in physical location) and utility service vendors can work together to provide the IT manager of tomorrow some significant new options!

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