The Next Generation Grid

Projektinformationen

NEXTGRID

ID Finanzhilfevereinbarung: 511563

Projekt abgeschlossen

Startdatum 18 August 2004

Enddatum 31 August 2007

Finanziert unter

• Information Society Technologies: thematic priority under the specific programme "Integrating and strengthening the European research area" (2002-2006).

Gesamtkosten € 16 458 615,00

EU-Beitrag € 11 000 000,00

Koordiniert durch

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
United Kingdom

Exploitable results

The next grid thing: Europe pioneers application grid technology

The Nextgrid vision is of grids, which are economically viable; in which new and existing business models are possible and profitable; in which development, deployment and maintenance are easy; and in which the provisions for security and privacy give confidence to businesses, consumers and the public. This vision looks far beyond the academic roots of grids in aiming to support fully the requirements of organisations and individuals from business and the public sector. It embraces a service-oriented infrastructure, which is as ubiquitous and transparent as the Web is today and which provides support for commercial, public sector and scientific applications. The complete realisation of this vision will take much longer than the duration of Nextgrid and involves a global effort combining resources many times greater than those deployed in this project. Nevertheless the work undertaken in Nextgrid constitutes an important step on the path to that realisation. In practice, the commercial adoption of grid technology, in applications that cross organisational boundaries, has not yet happened. This is largely because the balance of risk and reward in a commercial environment is different from that underpinning existing academic grids. Implicit business models make it difficult for each participant to assess this balance and manage risks. There are several specific factors that are holding back the deployment of multi-organisation grids supporting multiple applications. These relate to security, service level agreements, software licensing models, pricing, competitive procurement of services, the diverse nature of business services, difficulties in estimating costs in advance of deployment and the perceived and actual difficulty of deploying grids. A key task of Nextgrid has been to understand these barriers to the wider adoption of inter-enterprise grids beyond their current academic niche and to create an architecture which overcomes those barriers where possible. The consortium which undertook Nextgrid represents the different stakeholders from representative value chains. This is essential to ensure the development of grid infrastructures driven by viable business models. The consortium comprised: - Users with expertise in specific domains, where Grids have the potential to improve existing business processes and to stimulate new ways of doing business; - Hardware and software providers to address support, interoperability and licensing issues; - Service and infrastructure providers to address the viability of the commercial opportunities enabled by Grids; - Research organisations and academia to exploit and extend their existing expertise in Grids by identifying new challenges and opportunities. One long-term impact of Nextgrid will be realised through the evolution of standards. This is a slow, but essential part of the process of technological adoption. The generalised specifications developed in Nextgrid will have a significant influence on the evolution of these standards. The technical challenges derived from the business requirements have been measured against real-world needs through the analysis of application-driven experiments. Together this framework of vision, business requirements, technical challenges, experiments and architectural development has driven the work of the project. It has resulted in a legacy which is the generalised specifications, their contribution to the implementation of grids and their impact on standards. The principal outputs of Nextgrid comprise the generalised specifications and associated cookbook, which enable commercially viable grids, conforming to Nextgrid architectural principles to be implemented. Associated implementations of some Nextgrid components are already available. These, of course, are not a complete grid implementation, but are a stepping stone to such a complete implementation. Indeed many of the Nextgrid partners have plans to take forward these outputs as proprietary and open-source software releases and to use software components and derived know-how in their product and service offerings. Further projects, some already started and some in gestation, will continue the developments started by Nextgrid. The project has now successfully concluded, all its major objectives have been achieved and a significant step has been taken towards the achievement of its driving vision.