Immaturity

After the 2008 Olympic games, China's economy develops less rapidly, yet remains the world-leader in annual economic growth. The United States of America is just recovering from the war-effort in Iraq, and the government spending/budget is getting back on track. The European Union economy grows slowly but steadily, however being held back by its new member countries with bad economies, such as Turkey and Marocco. World economy on the whole is positive and growing.

Because of the upbeat economy attitudes are good and spirits are high. This is reflected in the (inter)national political arena, where international cooperation is being sought, turned around from the protectionist, introvert politics of the preceding years during the recession. This international cooperation opens the possibility for multinational companies (MNC) to go global as trade barriers are lowered. The good economy however, does have its negative sides. As global production is increased fueled by the extra demand for consumption, pressure is increased on the environment.

Continued advances in technology and scientific breakthroughs are being accelerated by the internet and other instant communication media. Moreover, global team working is a fact, not only due to the before mentioned reason, but also because of the increased mobility of scholars and students.

With regards to grid technology, the hardware, software and most of the infrastructure is available. Researchers are using grid technology in their (individual) laboratories. Driven by demand from the scientific community and governmental agencies (aviation, aerospace), grid infrastructure is being implemented on a large scale in countries where grid research has been performed for many years, such as the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Germany. As touched on earlier, (inter)national cooperation is strong, especially in the European Union, where they start a trial on the sharing and linking of information networks across country borders.

With hardware prices falling and the utilization of overcapacity in bandwidth, purchased in the dot.com boom, a distributed infrastructure is becoming affordable. However major investments are still financed by grants from the government and large MNC. Due to planning, complexity and other factors only large universities and institutions take the plunge.

Regarding the number of players on the market or competing parties, it is dominated by European governments and agencies. However there are some commercial vendors making first-movers efforts, such as IBM providing hardware level services, and Philips and Google attempting to fit this technology into an exploitable business strategy. The major problem holding grid technology back, especially for the commercial market, is the lack of (open) standards. As scientists around the world have mostly developed protocols and software for their specific needs, this is causing division and difficulty linking geographically dispersed grids together. This immaturity of the technology is keeping most commercial companies at bay, as they will not, cost-effectively and reliably, be able to implement the technology knowing there will not be any major changes to the technology or incompatibilities with any future standards. Although commercial companies recognize the potential benefits of the grid, they continue to have a ‘wait-and-see’-attitude towards the technology. Until there is a consensus and/or a framework of standards there will be no business of consumer market for grid technology.

Being a tried, tested and proven technology, supercomputers and cluster technology still dominate the market for scientific and massive computational power tasks. These technologies have matured over the years, and although considerably more expensive then grid, they are still preferred. This trend is additionally strengthened by the fact that companies or institutions are stuck with legacy systems, which might be cheaper to upgrade then replace.

>>back>>