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'Building Grids for Europe' brochure
Table of contents
- Welcome
- What is a Grid?
- Grids: Crucial technologies and applications for Europe
- Grid Expectations
- Emergency Response Grid
- The Health Grid
- Building Grids for Europe
- Towards a European Research Area for Grids
- Capitalising on EU Grid reseach
Grid expectations
Grids were originally conceived for tackling problems involving large amounts of data and/or compute-intensive calculations, so it is not surprising that the first Grids were developed for global-scale scientific projects — all deal in vast quantities of data, require supercomputer-scale number crunching and involve technically advanced teams spread throughout the world’s universities, research centres and hi-tech companies.
Today, however, Grids are entering completely new waters. Their impact on the world of engineering and business will be massive and is already being felt — but sectors as diverse as medicine, engineering, finance and entertainment are also facing radical changes.
Benefits on tap
Until the Grid, the only organisations which could afford supercomputing were those with large budgets and significant computing needs. Grids, however, could allow ‘supercomputing on tap’ — organisations pay for the power they need, when they need it, making supercomputing affordable to those who only need this sort of computing power occasionally.
The range of organisations who stand to benefit is surprising. Emergency response teams, for example, could build a Grid to handle data from the thousands of sensors already scattered through river basins, on mountain tops and even in orbit. This Grid could analyse, model and compare this data in real time to predict the risk of emergencies: flooding, avalanches or — when the basic science is ready — earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
When a disaster strikes, the team could then use the Grid to predict how the danger will spread, and to optimise resource allocation. Grid technologies can provide ad hoc the sort of data storage, processing power and communications required at the prices emergency response teams can afford.
Manufacturing
The Grid is much more than affordable supercomputing. Grid technologies allow users to share data, software, instruments and generally work together more closely, even when in different organisations on different continents. The impact could be profound on Europe’s manufacturing industries, where teams in different companies work together on data- and compute-intensive engineering and design projects.
Take the design of a new car. Although this is led by the car manufacturer, the project involves designers, engineers, computer experts and business managers from potentially hundreds of different suppliers, located around the world.
The different parts of the project, however, are highly interrelated — the engine has to fit under the bonnet. The different teams therefore have to work together closely, regularly integrating their data and models into the overall design and testing the overall result. Making these different models work together is complicated further by security — the project manager cannot give all team members access to the entire design.
A Grid can help by allowing data and models to be integrated together seamlessly without letting confidential information ‘leak’. Data from full vehicle crash tests carried out by one partner, for example, can be shared with every supplier, who can then use the Grid’s computing power to analyse their various components’ performance.
The result is improved, faster and less expensive design and manufacturing processes. This in turn translates into higher European competitiveness, more jobs and superior quality products.
From finance to retail
The benefits of Grids, however, will not be limited to large manufacturers and their suppliers. Companies in sectors as diverse as finance, retail and media could use Grid-based ‘virtual work spaces’ to collaborate more closely with their partners, as well as profit from the Grids’ ability to mine data and transform it into knowledge.
Archives of print and audiovisual media, for example, are currently being semantically indexed in massive databases located around the world. With Grid technology, publishers will be able to search these archives, extract knowledge and deliver new content services quickly and flexibly. The full richness of the world’s Cultural Heritage, currently locked away in databases across the globe, will be opened to everyone.
Retailers, on the other hand, would be able to manage their supply chains and customer relationships better and mine their geographically dispersed databases for buying patterns, while the financial and insurance sectors could perform better analyses of statistics, demographics and more.