Million Dollar Baby long version
Million Dollar Baby
It all starts off in the spring of 2006. After decades of repression and almost another decade of war and foreign presence, Iraq is finally stable again to continue on its own. Once this major war-effort burden was lifted from the US economy it started to recover again. Within a few months the dollar was actually back at pre-war rates.
In that same year Turkey got admitted into the EU and Brazil won the World cup. We also see IBM getting a bigger and better bite out of the Grid computing arena. An arena normally just dominated by government funded research institutions and universities.
In December IBM introduced version 5 of their Grid Toolbox. It was potentially able to integrate with any other grid package with relative ease because it supported web-services for communication purposes. Because of IBM’s influence as being a large player in this still non-existent market other grid package developers were now also coerced into complying with this standard as well.
Then finally in 2007; Microsoft launches the long awaited Longhorn operating system which introduced Digital Rights Management (DRM) and IPv6 technology to the general public. That same year Google introduced the Google-grid, giving every user virtually unlimited space to store or publish their data, offering everyone a safer and more reliable storage solution. This turned out to become the first major commercial information grid success.
By the beginning of 2008 IPv6 was being used by 80% of the consumers on the internet. Because of this widespread adoption the extra IP-addresses stimulated the IP-telephony sector which had just taken over the number one position from normal telephony.
In March China held the 2008 World Olympics; showing the world how it had evolved into an economic and technologic superpower. By the end of 2008, Switzerland and Croatia get admitted into the EU. The EU population and economy still grow at a steady 3% rate, largely due to the eastern member states.
2009: With the rising economy more virtual companies started to flourish. These companies had an enormous cost benefit by not having to pay for office spaces, maintaining their own corporate network and computer equipment. By means of storing all their applications on the Enterprise Google-Grid, people could simply work at home on their own computers. Various large companies suffered from this sudden competition. Many however were quickly able to adopt the new technologies.
2009: Was also the year that the first national grids emerged in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.
In 2010, after years of economic welfare, the world was facing the effects of another oil price increase and an aging population. On the bright side however we can report that Holland actually won the 2010 World Cup. The finale was decided by a thrilling penalty shootout.
2011: With the increased usage of information grids business attention into computational grids increased as well. Among other players also Google, Microsoft, and IBM team up to start working on a global grid computing package based on IBM’s latest Grid Toolbox. They name the project Epic.
In August the economy slowed down even further which caused a rise in the need for cost efficiency. This time the budget cuts did not affect grid technology. The previous successes of the information grids in reducing costs provided the investors the confidence that computational grids could save even more.
2012: The first beta version of Epic has been put available for download. Epic enabled people to share their idle-cycles with other Epic users. However the credit system did not work out properly and the currently available high performance consumer applications did not really draw in the anticipated big crowds. In April 2013 Epic was discontinued because of the lack of interest by consumers.
In the beginning of 2013 however, research labs and businesses doing large scale simulations provided a new market for Epic. After some specific modifications, Epic was ready to be used for the business research market, offering computational resources anywhere every time at the price level you wanted.
By 2014 grid technology became the choice for running largely parallel (scientific) applications.