Grid computing's future is bright, speakers agreed at the first Grid Computing Planet Conference & Expo in San Jose June 17, but they disagreed on how soon that future will arrive.
Some, like IBM Grid Computing General Manager Tom Hawk, see Grid's promise being fulfilled "much faster than people realize."
IBM's ultimate vision for Grid is a utility model over the Internet, where clients draw on compute power much as they do now with electricity. With more than 60% of IT budgets dedicated to maintenance and integration - a percentage that Hawk says continues to rise - the need to reduce complexity and management demands is a pressing one.
But others, like Ian Baird of Platform Computing and Andrew Chien of Entropia, see the Internet utility model as 5-10 years away. But Grid is providing real benefits now within the enterprise, they say, with strong productivity gains in compute-intensive areas such as manufacturing and product design.
"We believe that integrated compute and data Grids are available today" within the enterprise, said Andrew Grimshaw of Avaki, whose DataGrid technology has been licensed by both IBM and Platform.
But for Grid to enter the technology mainstream, speakers said, it will need to move beyond compute-intensive applications that are parallel in nature, to transactional applications like online banking and classic business functions.
The way applications are developed will also have to evolve for Grid to gain wider acceptance, said Stephen Scott of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "We are still in the 1980s as far as application development goes," Scott said. If someone wants to improve an application by running it in a Grid environment, they first must rewrite it in parallel, he said.
Applications must still be hand-coded, Scott said. "As a field, it hasn't advanced as much as I thought it would," he said. "You need to have an idea where it's going to run. It can't just be recompiled in a different environment."
United Devices and Entropia claim success in porting applications to a Grid environment with ease, and Platform has an intensive program working with developers to Grid-enable applications. But IBM's Hawk agreed with Scott that applications "are in a state of immaturity," haven't been designed for Grid systems, and can be difficult to Grid-enable.
The good news, Scott said, is that Grid technology should spur improvement in applications development. "As Grid evolves, applications development should improve," he said.
Peter Jeffcock of Sun Microsystems agreed that "95% of applications aren't parallel." But the Global Grid Forum is working on a standard, the Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA), that should improve Grid applications integration, he said.
Oracle views applications as less important than the data they process, said Geoff Brown, the company's technical director for ATS Core Technologies. Oracle's view of Grid technology is a "database cluster" with a "global single image," instead of the distributed data paradigm envisioned by others, he said.
Editor's note: We will provide more coverage of the Grid Computing Planet Conference & Expo later this week.
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