During the past 10 years, hundreds of grid projects have come and gone,
passing away after funding ran dry. Most didn’t have a realistic
strategy for sustainability, let alone a viable business model for their
infrastructures, tools, applications or services. Often, the only asset
left after the project’s end was the hands-on expertise gained by
those involved, which is certainly valuable in the long run, but doesn’t
justify the effort and funding. So far, in my opinion, grids didn’t
keep up to their full promise.
Full Article...What clouds and grids can learn from each other
During the past 10 years, hundreds of grid projects have come and gone,
passing away after funding ran dry. Most didn’t have a realistic
strategy for sustainability, let alone a viable business model for their
infrastructures, tools, applications or services. Often, the only asset
left after the project’s end was the hands-on expertise gained by
those involved, which is certainly valuable in the long run, but doesn’t
justify the effort and funding. So far, in my opinion, grids didn’t
keep up to their full promise.
What went wrong?
Sure, grids, by their very nature, are complex to design, build and maintain;
and applications are cumbersome to run. It might take another 10 years of
trial and error (and re-writing grid middleware?) to navigate the labyrinth
of new technologies and paradigms, such as Utility Computing, Autonomic Computing,
ASP, SOA, SOI, SaaS, PaaS, HaaS, Outsourcing, Hosting, Virtualization, Web 2.0
and Mashups...
And obviously, grids followed a natural curve: technology trigger, inflated
expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, and–
finally–plateau of productivity. Some technologies disappear completely.
For me, however, we are now facing a potential renaissance, triggered by the
appearance of... clouds.
Cloud computing, as offered by companies like Sun, IBM, Amazon, Google, CloudCamp,
and others, will soon become an important component of R&D, adding a new,
‘external’ dimension of flexibility by enhancing one’s ‘
home’ resource capacity when needed Existing businesses will use them during
peak demand, service providers will host their applications on them and provide
Software as a Service (SaaS), and start-ups will integrate them without needing
to buy resources upfront.
Plumbing
While grids provide the ‘plumbing’ to enable access to distributed
resources, clouds denote service on a pay-per-use basis. Grids stand out
because of their flexible, dynamic, feature-rich resources; they are thus innately
complex. This complexity, however, must be hidden from the end-user (e.g. in the
form of a cloud) if we want acceptance of this infrastructure.
Cloud applications will likely follow similar stages as grid-enabling ones. Just
as challenging, though, are the cultural, mental, legal, and political aspects.
It is difficult to imagine users easily entrusting their corporate assets and
sensitive data to cloud service providers. Today, the status of clouds seems
to be similar to that of grids in the early 2000s: a few simple and well-suited
application run on clouds, but more complex and demanding applications will face
many barriers to overcome.
Sure, clouds are easier to deploy than grids:
Clouds are user-friendly, service oriented, on-demand. But if clouds aim to
‘replace’ grids, they face similar challenges. Even a single grid
service running in a cloud image (or using a service in the cloud) will quickly
face the roadblocks we know from grids today.
The role of DEISA
One promising solution might be the Distributed European Infrastructure for
Supercomputing Applications, or DEISA,
which is moving from a grid to a cloud. DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative, or
DECI,
is successfully offering millions of supercomputing hours to the European e-Science
community and helping scientists gain new scientific insights.
Why is DECI successful? Several reasons, in my opinion: it has a targeted focus on
specific, long-running, supercomputing applications; many applications run on one
single system; it has user-friendly access to resources through
DESHL
and UNICORE; it gives consortium
partners full autonomy; and there is an application task force
(ATASKF)
that helps users plug in to the supercomputing infrastructure. If all this were to stay,
DEISA would have some real staying power. And then, we might have a DEISA Cloud which
will become an external HPC node within your grid application workflow.
Lessons learned
So what can clouds learn from grids?
- We should lower our expectations in the first place.
- No claim for universality, please!
- We should keep clouds simple, focused, with services easily embedded as standard components.
- When building larger, more general infrastructures, we might think of a
“grid of clouds” –a hierarchy
which leaves as much autonomy as possible to smaller service
components and contributing and collaborating partners.
- Leave coordinating functions to the existing overarching grid, thus bypassing mental,
social, political and legal barriers which usually arise through more direct integration.
The good news is: clouds will help grids mature, and grids will help clouds avoid some
teething troubles. Clouds will teach grids that to be widely accepted and sustainable,
grids must be simple, user-friendly, service oriented, scalable, on-demand, with simple applications.
And grids teach clouds that by raising the bar of expectations too high, they could easily
plunge into the trough of disillusionment.
With this sea-change ahead of us, there
will be a continuing need for support of the work of the Open Grid Forum (OGF). Certainly,
existing processes can be agreed upon and developed that are streamlined, shortened, and
more efficient outside it. But only an agreed-upon set of standards will enable
e-infrastructures and grid applications to be easily built from different components,
and move towards an agile, federated service platform. Only standards, such as those
developed in OGF, will guarantee interoperability of technology components best suited
for your applications–and thus reduce dependency on proprietary building blocks,
keep costs under control, and increase research and business flexibility.
Wolfgang Gentzsch, DEISA Project, Duke University, and Board of Directors,
Open Grid Forum Show Article Preview... 
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