The Step from Grid Research to Successful Grid Businesses

Abstract

Resent research generated many valuable solutions for technical issues of Grid computing. The Grid research comprised scientific applications, middleware architectures, resource optimization tools, as well as management tools. However, until now, there are only very few businesses built around these Grid solutions. The existing business models only address very specific niches. Within this paper, we discuss the technology components that are missing to turn Grid computing from a research topic into a successful service for everybody. The goal is to aggregate spare resources from anybody on the Internet and sell it to somebody on the Internet in the desired size. Only if this is possible, Grid computing will be affordable and accessible to everybody in the future. Within this paper, we point out some of the different tools that are necessary to make this happen and discuss the business incentives for using Grid computing.