Guy Tel-Zur's Blog

I just read in Supercomputingonline about EGEE III, the 3rd phase of the gigantic Grid Computing project: " EGEE-III will last for 24 months, with a total manpower bid of almost 10,000 person months and an EC budget of Euro 36 million. As with EGEE-II, partners will provide extra effort to the project beyond that funded by the EC, bringing the total project budget up to Euro 70 million, and also contributing a further estimated Euro 50 million worth of computing resources." and I ask myself what is more justified , a single extended 3PFLOPs BlueGene/P with 884,736-processors or thousands of various kinds of old 32 bit boxes distributed all over the world running Scientific Linux 3.0.X and gLite? For years we were told that no single data center site will be able to cope with a few PB of data per year that will be produced by the LHC; Nice Powerpoint presentations showed a 20km tower of CDROMs, higher than the Mt. Blanc, indicating that only distributed Grid Computing environ...

In the year 2003 the MIT Technology review ranked "Grid Computing" among the 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World [1]. We are now four years later and something is not going well with "Grid Computing". An indication that there is a problem can easily be seen by looking at the "Google Trends" plot for the term "Grid Computing": (click on the image to get the current trend). This finding can be compared with another buzz word, "Virtualization", which is older than "Grid Computing" and yet is gaining more and more momentum: There is however one exception. The Academic Grid is still having lot's of glory thanks to the huge heavily funded European (EGEE) and other US projects. When LHC data will start to be taken at CERN it will reach it's top importance. But, it seems that for other scientific projects Grid Computing is not going to be such a success. It will remain as "Nice to have" but will never...