Let's Pretend to Agree

Standard methods for gridding applications would help speed the glacial pace of grid acceptance by reducing the cost and complexity of the development process. Though standards bodies and alliances have emerged - such as the Global Grid Forum, Enterprise Grid Alliance and the Globus Alliance - competing grid definitions, proprietary technologies and entrenched vendor allegiances have caused them to collapse into warring factions, according to grid analysts. "Right now, we're at the end of the first [stage] where everyone's battling," says Illuminata's Eunice. "It's not the prettiest of pictures."

There are two major steps left to go before grid becomes enterprise-ready: First, the different groups must agree upon a set of standards; second, vendors need to build those standards into their products.

Fellows is not convinced the fighting will stop long enough to move beyond the first stage. "When users see more and more [standards] organizations, then users see more and more complexity," he says.

But open source may break the gridlock on grid. The Globus Toolkit (now in its fourth version) is free for anyone to use. Yet, the toolkit is limited; it's good enough to be effective at some tasks - such as analytic and electronic design automation applications - but not good enough to be effective at everything, says Eunice.

As for CIO uptake - who knows? The Globus Alliance, the non-profit group that offers the toolkit, does little marketing and does not diligently track enterprise usage. Worse, grid skills are in short supply, which makes many CIOs unwilling to share project details, leaving neophyte gridders with no road maps to follow.

For all its early promise and economic benefits, in the end, grid computing may end up being a mirage for CIOs. They will continue to hear about how grid computing is an idyllic solution that everyone will be using in 10 years or 20 years (which they have already been saying for 10 years). Right now, says Gartner's Claunch, "CIOs can't see how to get from here to there."

For the few who can, such as McKay, the view is pretty good. It's taken his IT department more than two years to get to where they are now with grid computing, but it's been well worth it. "Our ability to execute more effectively, to achieve the business results, is huge."

Too bad most CIOs can't share those results.

SIDEBAR: Deeper Background on Grid

Not sure you're working on a grid? Check out the GRID CHECKLIST www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/%7Efoster/Articles/WhatIsTheGrid.pdf, by Ian Foster, the father of grid computing. Also, read the paper written by Foster and others that defines the ANATOMY OF THE GRID www.globus.org/alliance/publications/papers/anatomy.pdf.

SIDEBAR: WHAT GRID IS - AND ISN'T

Grid computing connects storage and data, as well as CPUs from multiple systems, into a centrally managed but flexible computing environment. True grid provides distributed resource management of heterogeneous systems in which you can quickly add and subtract systems - without regard for location, operating system or normal purpose - as needs dictate.

Utility computing is one of a variety of marketing phrases (others include autonomous computing, computing-on-demand, adaptive enterprise) applied to business models that let customers retrieve computing resources as necessary. Grid is the underlying technology for all of these models.

Clustering simply refers to collections of computers in a fixed configuration designed to operate and be managed as a single, high-performance machine. Unlike grid, computers cannot enter and leave the pool as necessary - once in, they're in for good.

SIDEBAR: GRID ON THE MARCH

1960s Distant Relatives In 1965, the developers of an operating system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, an ancestor of Unix) presented a vision of "computing as a utility", which is similar to grid computing today, according to CERN's GridCafe Web site.

1970s The Birth of Grid According to Grid.org, when computers were first linked by networks, the idea of harnessing unused CPU cycles was born. A few early experiments included a pair of programs called Creeper and Reaper that ran on the ARPAnet (the precursor to the Internet).

1980s Grid Refined Scientists used grid computing to connect multiple workstations, which allowed them to work on complicated maths problems and software compilations, utilizing idle CPUs to reduce processing times.

1996 Free Grid! The Globus Alliance formed to conduct R&D for the technology, standards and systems that form the grid. Alliance members eventually produced open-source software that is central to nearly half a billion dollars' worth of international science and engineering activities.

1997 The First on the Net Distributed.net became the first general-purpose grid-computing network on the Internet, according to Grid.org. Distributed.net eventually brought thousands of people together to crack cryptographic challenges in a distributed environment.

1999 SETI, Phone Home The SETI@home project launched at the University of California at Berkeley. It uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Anyone who has an Internet connection and some spare CPUs can participate by running a free program that analyzes radio telescope data. So far, more than 5 million people have signed up.

2001 Top This! Launched in August by the National Science Foundation, the TeraGrid aims to build and deploy the world's largest distributed infrastructure for open scientific research by linking major supercomputing sites such as the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Centre for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology.

SOURCES: CERN's GridCafe; Grid.org; Globus Alliance; SETI@home; TeraGrid Project