Delivery of industrial-strength Grid Middleware: Establishing an effective European Approach The distribution of roles and functions between the private and public sectors in supporting exploitation and commercial take-up 21 January 2004 The distribution of roles and functions between the private and public sectors in supporting exploitation and commercial take-up 21 January 2004 Dr. Stefan Mayer, MSC.Software GmbH

Introductory Remarks Compare equivalence between Grid middleware and MPI MPI available in open source and proprietary implementations In industrial environments, MPI is mainly deployed on homogeneous systems Platform interoperability is a major new aspect and challenge for grid middleware View on role of open source and proprietary implementations strongly influenced by experiences with MPI

Exploitation and Commercial Take-up Moving grid software from research into business critical industrial environments will be the major driving force for exploitation and commercial take-up This will happen by integrating grid middleware into commercial software systems for complex problem solving environments

Exploitation and Commercial Take-up Grid standards are public New standards or extensions should typically first be implemented in open source Advantages are speed of implementation, availability of software on multiple relevant computer architectures Recommended for early exploitation of research projects Public funding important Take-up by commercial middleware providers desired Advantages are tuned and stable versions, guaranteed support, and most importantly, clear legal conditions Competition with open source implementations is fruitful Commercial providers with a multi platform view preferred to avoid proprietary implementation for each platform Challenge is interoperability of the different implementations Distributed official testbed? Which gremium is the test authority?

Action Plan Suggestions Grid Standard Base (GSB) Official grid QA tests and certifications including interoperability Grid Benchmark Suite