1. Centre d’Excellence en Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication
EC Workshop 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 Pierre Guisset, Brussels, Jan 21, 2004

2. Commercial exploitation for Europe’s benefit
Position Objective
Focus grid research to really impact european industry
Take the lead – develop European expertise and new business lines
Perform more and better, create more Business Added Value with less HW investment
Commercial exploitation for Europe’s benefit
Janvier 2004

3. The Players, the problem to solve…
Huge research effort (FP5, FP6, nat.)
Marginal involvement of software editors and ICT service companies
Is it beyond a marketing & communication action?
New solution paradigm
Small impact on EU industry
Where is grid today?
“It’s not for me…”
Perform more and better with less HW investment
Research Org.
Software Dev. Org.
Industrial End Users
Research efforts
In software technology
- next generation grid
- enabling application technologies
In infrastructure
- Higt performance grid, high capacity, high speed network
Soft Editors: new solution paradigm: traditional parallel processing approach are not appropriate anymore. From HPC to Grid…
End User: today, grid is almost nowhere. It is time to deploy grid solutions, in order to identify the bottlenecks and solve those.
Currently, either large HPC specific machines (supercomputers, clusters) for specific business critical or science strategic appl., run in a controlled environment… this is not really grid.
Or, some org. Are recycling their old PC in their computing centre, in order to build processing power.
But still huge obstacles to fully exploit the opportunity: data confidentiality, use comfort, quality…
Janvier 2004

4. Recommended set of actions
Focus Research on Industry requirements
Including real life constraints:
Security, data confidentiality, fault tolerance, flexible and adaptive scheduling
Effective standardisation and quality
Technology bridging:
Support technology transfer centres, network them
Initiatives grouping end-users, software companies and research organisations, driven by technology transfer centres
Clear positioning for Open Source models for grid middleware, to favour local EU business
Web site for hosting Open Source grid middleware, grid-enabled applications, quality indicators, and for disseminating white papers, experience reports…
Janvier 2004