Applying grid technologies to the business world

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The BEinGRID (Business Experiments in Grid) project is funded by the European Commission to develop components that meet the business needs of Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) across Europe. One of the aims of BEinGRID is to bridge the gap between the early grid adopters and those more pragmatic, as well as more conservative, technology users. The hardening and extension of components, as well as the successful demonstrations of their use across a number of business case studies, should encourage more widespread adoption of grid technologies by business.

In order to produce results that are pertinent and attractive to businesses, the BEinGRID project has set up two waves of pilot projects, or Business Experiments (BEs), to help gather requirements using real business scenarios. The first wave consisted of eighteen BEs and finished in June. These BEs contributed requirements and scenarios for technical and business work packages in the BEinGRID project. The requirements extracted from the BEs have been used to guide the development of a number of components. EPCC, at the University of Edinburgh, has taken the lead role of the data management work package. As part of this work package, EPCC has already developed two OGSA-DAI related components: the Data Source Publisher and the OGSA-DAI Trigger. The Data Source Publisher provides a GUI interface for installing OGSA-DAI and its pre-requisite software. The OGSA-DAI Trigger component provides a mechanism to react to changes which occur in a database by executing an OGSA-DAI workflow.

These components, as well as others from different thematic areas, together with technical and business guidelines have been made available in the Gridipedia repository. This repository is intended to act as an access point for businesses to find out how they could use grid technology. It will also act as a distribution point for grid software and components. To facilitate the dissemination of the project’s results, a number of demonstrations are available from the Gridipedia repository. These demonstrators showcase some of the benefits of integrating grid technology into business.

EPCC is also involved in GRID Business to Business, which is known as GRID(B2B). It is one of the second wave of seven BEs chosen from an open call. This second phase, as well as contributing more requirements to the common activities, will act as a validation of the components already developed during the first two years of the project. GRID2(B2B) aims to allow B2B platforms to significantly evolve from the current state-of-the-art. At present, data and process synchronisation between the participants of a B2B network requires a human operator to login to a portal or to generate and process files that represent supply-chain activities. What is missing? An affordable B2B platform extension that automates this synchronisation process. While bigger companies can adopt new software, SMEs can only afford synchronisation if they can retain their original (legacy) infrastructure. The technological cornerstone is OGSA-DAI, as enhanced with the BEinGRID Data Source Publisher and OGSA-DAI Trigger components.

The BEinGRID project runs until November 2009 and aims to produce more successful BEs, components and demos. For more information please visit the BEinGRID website.

Craig Thomson, EPCC.

www.beingrid.eu

www.gridipedia.eu