Commercial Sucess

China economy benefits from 2008 Olympic game and 2010 world expo, and is the focus of the world. U.S.A recovers from war and resumes its strong consumption power. EU economy grows slowly but steadily with increasing member states and social institutional reform, the world economy enters into a steady growth. (2005-2010)
However, after the economic boom before 2010, there is emerging pressure and crisis from aging population, oil prices increase, world power restructure, etc. International economical and political environments both become unstable. Countries and companies survive in a dynamic balance of international cooperation & competition. (2010-2015)

The world in the next decade is highly globalized & mobilized. With scholars, students, businessmen traveling and living around the word, international research & engineering collaboration is prevalent. Needs for information and computation power sharing are strong. Yet global competition is also intensive, which drives forward needs for economy of scale & scope. Both aspects increase demands for Grid computing. Moreover, economical prosperity accelerates scientific research in Grid, which is fully finance by both government & business.

With fundamental infrastructure and open standards available, the Grid technology is mature, yet it is still having programming difficulties with existing close source software, which hinders its wide spread usage. The conquering of the problem is just a matter of time.

With wider bandwidth, more convenient access to internet available, and the cost of hardware keeps going down, cost of Grid infrastructure is becoming lower & lower. High competition in this field further pushes the prices down.

Big commercial companies such IBM are competing to provide both software & hardware infrastructure, trying to build their brands and dominate the market. At the same time, many small IT companies and diligent free software writers are also active in customized Grid-embedded software development, with the support of worldwide adopted open standards and open source software movement. As a result, Grid becomes a promising star in commercial market and the agenda of CIOs, especially in B2B market. Grid surpasses its competing technologies such as Clusters and Super Computers, with its distinctive ability to utilize virtually unlimited surplus computing power, remote information sharing & processing, and tolerance of heterogeneous nodes. However, it still faces obstacles in B2C market. Although very much interested, consumers are still concerned with privacy and security issues.

In all, the shortcomings of implementing super computers & clustering alone are becoming more and more evident. Grid is converging them together with distributed computing, the Web, peer-to-peer and virtualization technologies into a larger framework. The cost-effectiveness it brings makes companies enthusiastic about its application. Yet for the individual end users, it takes a while for Grid to really become the utility over internet.

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