Grid computing is expected to become a mainstream business-enterprise topology during the rest of the decade. This article, Part 1 in a series of 4, gives an overview of current and emerging technologies in this area.

By Enrique Castro-Leon and
Joel Munter,
Intel® Solution Services

A number of technology transitions are taking place or will take place within the next five years that will lower the barriers that exist today to deploy, maintain, and run applications on computer grids. Most of the literature dwells on performance gains and application capabilities enabled by the new technologies. Perhaps a more interesting exercise is to take these transitions to their logical conclusions and speculate as to what new business models will become feasible. A second exercise is to determine the optimal strategies for organizations contemplating grid deployment.

The grid is not only of interest to scientists and engineers running applications, the traditional user community for grids. Grid deployments in the next decade will encompass a broad swath of industry verticals that will take the grid well beyond its High Performance Computing (HPC) roots. Beyond capabilities delivered to end users, every participant in the ecosystem has a vested interest in the acceleration in grid uptake: users enjoying new and powerful capabilities, vendors seeking new channels and additional revenues, and organizations discovering that grid deployment can bring associated cost reductions and a welcome competitive edge.

While attempts at predicting discontinuous events are not usually very accurate at determining actual outcome, the authors believe that the process of building a thought experiment is intrinsically useful. Moreover, the readers, far from being mere witnesses, will find that these ideas will bring other powerful ideas by association that will lead to a positive influence when it comes to grid evolution.