Why Grid

?"> What is the purpose of all this focus on grid? To solve the complexity of infrastructure that has cropped up as commercial enterprises and scientific bodies face applications mired in silos, with underutilized resources representing a huge waste of wads of cash. The complexity issue is well understood, Foster said—however, the solution is not, as it encompasses myriad intertwined technologies, including Web services, utility computing, virtualization, data center automation and adaptive enterprise. "The context for our work is the increasingly complex applications you encounter, thanks in large part to the emergence of the Internet and high-speed networks," Foster said during his keynote. "These applications may appear in the sciences. Alternatively they may come from industry," with complex Web transactions sucking up large amounts of computing resources, he said. For some time, people have been building applications to be dynamic in terms of resources they bring to bear on computing, Foster said. Often, however, they are implemented using proprietary technologies, often targeting a single, dedicated infrastructure as a basis for execution. Building reliable, robust and secure applications is already difficult, Foster said. Doing it in a shared environment such as grid is even more difficult. "Until recently, people avoided that and built overprovisioned silos for every [application] in the enterprise," he said. "Globus is a recognition that its no longer feasible to build silos for every application we develop," as it is a body committed to the idea of doing so in an open-source fashion. Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest utility computing news, reviews and analysis.