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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
What is a Grid?
Everyone understands that electricity is generated using everything from nuclear plants to windmills. We also know it is stored, transmitted, distributed, sold and re-sold in complex commercial and technical arrangements.
But we don’t need to know any of these details — electricity is just something that comes out of the plug. It’s available, affordable and dependable. Every now and then we pay a bill, but we control how much or how little we use, and can choose the best supplier for our needs. Most of us don’t even know what electricity really is — it’s just there, making things work.
In the knowledge-based economy that Europe must become if it is to prosper in the 21st century, we need a second Grid: one that supplies enormous computing power and knowledge without forcing us to worry about where and how.
A new computing paradigm
This new sort of Grid works by connecting together huge varieties of computers, data repositories, software programs, scientific instruments and more.
Connecting such resources together, in itself, is not revolutionary — after all, every time you look up a page on the Web you are connecting your PC to a computer somewhere else in the world.
A Grid, however, allows you to tap that computer’s processing power, rather than simply look at some of its files. Now add the power of a thousand other computers spread across the globe. You choose how much power you want to use — your Computational Grid parcels the job and shares it out to computers connected to it. Suddenly your PC has become a gateway to an supercomputer, but you only pay for the power you need, when you need it.
But you have much more than that — you can also access massive amounts of data, whether it is stored in dedicated data storage devices or flowing from scientific instruments and sensors. They are all attached to your Data Grid which — thanks to the computing power available — can both process and store this data easily, using a whole range of software designed to make the most of the Grid’s computing power and distributed data.
And more still — Grid computing power enables new sorts of software to become possible. Instead of data coming out of that plug in the wall you now get access to knowledge, represented by semantic analysis software running on your Knowledge Grid. Your PC can understand and manipulate this knowledge, providing you with instant access to answers to queries from across the world.
Finally, you are not alone on this Grid — through it you work with your project team, composed of members located on different continents, working for different organisations. This Service Grid dynamically creates a virtual organisation, working in a virtual laboratory. Sensors and experiments are controlled remotely, data is stored, shared and processed instantly, results are analysed online, and relevant knowledge from the world’s databases found and combined with it.
It doesn’t matter if your team is modelling the Earth’s atmosphere, designing cars, creating animated films or finding new medicines, the basic principle is the same: your Grid supplies all the computing power, software, data and knowledge you need in one integrated package, and helps project teams work more closely together.