IBM's chief architect of WebSphere, Donald Ferguson, has used the
TechXNY conference in New York to explain how Web services will
speed up the adoption of grid computing.
"One of the things that has become clear in the last year is the
synergy between grid computing and Web services," said Ferguson,
during a keynote at the Web Services Edge arm of TechXNY.
Web services, Ferguson said, will provide the application
integration aspect of grids, particularly as grid initiatives such
as Global Grid Forum move to embrace Web services protocols, namely
WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and XML.
The grid, meanwhile, will be at the centre of widespread
integration, he added.
"The grid is evolving to be the middleware and operating system
that hosts Web services," Ferguson explained. "Web services
function as a linking mechanism between coarse-grained components
in the grid of grids."
Ferguson added that grids are closer than most people think.
"I don't think the grid is as far off as it sounds. The reason it
seems far off is because we have two different sets of
conversations around grid computing," he said.
One conversation is the use of grids in academic and scientific
communities and the other is a conversation taking place in
business communities. The business-oriented discussion is in
essence grid computing - even if people don't know it, Ferguson
said.
"People have been talking about the grid, they just don't realise
it," he said, adding that outsourcing, subscribing to an
application service provider and content distribution networks are
examples of early grids.
Looking towards the future, Ferguson said that the first step
toward grids will be their use in single-node environments, the
second step is using grids to outsource complex computations such
as data mining and the third step will be when grids are used to
host services.
"With a grid, you'll be able to say, 'give me your application and
I can host it,' or 'give me your portlet and I can host that,'" he
said. "The grid will be less about storage and CPU cycles, and more
about capabilities that can be offered."