What missing in the gird world ? - Applications!

If one wonders why the grid is not widely used, the answer is trivial - A p p l i c a t i o n s!
Obvious - not ?

Well not so obvious. There are many other issues that cause the application to be not present.

First is the parallel thinking, most of us think serial, or at least not really parallel. It causes both, the application development and the user understanding more complicated. So it should be covered with a lot of abstraction layers that will give good feelig for the user.

Developers, QA, trainers, etc. need to change the way they think. It is not easy to make this major change mainly since there is no methodologies and best practices. The lack of tools can be seen as great opportunity. There is much knowledge in this area, but it is concentrated within the universities and research institutes. Those organizaitons do not understand the industry needs nor the business models.

What about the need?
It is clear that more compute power can be used and contribute to any company, on the other side it is not clear what is the marginal contrubution. The right question qould be not what we gain from doing it but rather what we loose if we do not do it. That is the exact problem of the grid applications. There are many killer apps, but none of them was found yet....

Developing the business model for grid application will probably make a difference. In the past, search engines did not had a common incoming model. Then came Google and the rest is history. SaaS, cloud, etc. are nice ideas, but they are not the business model that you will crash on.

We wait very much for the Google of the Grid world.

Middle-ware - the glue between companies

Now it is clear, the computer resources are relatively cheap when using it as part of the Terra-computing. If Amazon can offer storage and CPU time lower then the cost of disks and retail computer price while it includes installation and maintenance (for storage it probalby includes backup too), the "Cloud computing" is here.

This architecture changes some of the concepts as can be see here. This time, I want to focus on the meaning of the "middleware" and its role in this environment. According to Wikipedia, it can be seen as "services that allow multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact across a network". So in this case the middleware will connect between resources that are located in different autonomous systems. Wait a moment....that is one of the grid definitions. So do we expect the middleware to connect storage from S3 at Amazon with Google-App-Engine ?

It is simple - YES !

The middleware would need to allow creating collaboration over outsourced resources! In the future we might see the cloud computer providers as telephone companies. Huge companies that offer services cheap. But still the middleware will create different clouds for the programmers and will allow focusing on the business intelligence rather than on the maintenance.

Will it be free ? - I hope not always!

Since the commercial companies (and other users) might need a legal contract (that states privacy), this service should not be always free. On the other hand, and as always, new models will come up. Today the most ubiquitous model includes commercials. As in Hotmail. Gmail. etc. - you do not pay money, but you see our commercials. IMHO more models would be seen.