Grid computing - sharing spare processor capacity - began to be
noticed when it was used as an aid in the search for extra
terrestrial intelligence. Now businesses are finding more
profitable applications for it. Karl Cushing reports
The pursuit of alien life has until now been the main focus of grid
computing. But the ability to access shared resources could not be
ignored by the business community indefinitely. At least this is
what consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) tells us in its
Technology Forecast for 2002-2004, Emerging Patterns of Internet
Computing. The report describes a world of distributed and shared
resources, where computing and communications become so ubiquitous
that they are essentially invisible and organisations satisfy their
computing needs in the same way that they buy their electricity or
water.
The Internet will become the platform for all information and
computing, and the emergence of the grid computing model will see
"the amalgamation of computing resources from heterogeneous systems
run by different organisations".
But while grid computing is a hot topic and a technology with a
great deal of potential, Kevin Findlay, senior technology analyst
at PwC's Menlo Park Europe technology centre, says it has to be
viewed in the context the bigger picture. "Commoditisation is the
key word - grid computing is just a step down that road," he says.
Grid computing allows multiple computers and spare processing power
to be applied to a common goal by using intelligent agents on PCs
to show when they are able to supply processing power which is
managed by middleware.
Grid computing found its first application in the scientific
analysis of large amounts of data. Perhaps the best known example
is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or Seti@Home,
project where thousands of people have pooled their unused
processing power to help to analyse radio data from outer space in
a bid to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Business applications have been relatively limited. However, PwC
predicts that grid computing will become prevalent in the
commercial world, enabling businesses to share resources, including
networks and storage, first within their own organisations and then
across organisational boundaries.
According to PwC, the Internet itself will also be transformed. The
Net as we know it today is merely "a first attempt at building a
reliable and scalable worldwide network", says the report. In a
sense, grid computing will carry the mantle of the Internet, doing
for resources what it has done for information. It will facilitate
the construction of distributed inter-enterprise applications and
even support the take-up of Web services, as the development of
grid computing will inevitably mean that issues of reliability and
security will need to be dealt with - exactly the same issues that
PwC believes could otherwise stunt the growth of the Web services
model.
If grid computing takes off it will be of interest to specific
vertical sectors like the oil industry, manufacturing and
pharmaceuticals which have a huge demand for IT and processing
power and already use supercomputers. Current high-profile business
users trying out grid computing include Pratt & Whitney, Boeing
and GlaxoSmithKline.
Last week the Abbey National's Treasury Services (Ants) wing
announced that it has been using grid computing to calculate
complex risk assessments, which could herald a massive take-up of
the model in the financial sector. The IT director of Ants, John
Hasson, says grid computing is perfect for repetitive,
processor-hungry applications such as risk calculations. "It is
massively attractive. You are sweating your assets. It effectively
gives you back, or makes available, a lot of your processing
power," he says. Hasson believes that the model will be used
increasingly in the financial sector and that IT directors across
the board should be looking at it more closely. "It is a relatively
easy decision to make," he says. "The more you can take advantage
of your asset-base the better for the organisation and your
shareholders."
This idea of sweating existing assets by using them to carry out
tasks normally done by expensive supercomputers or by the
time-consuming method of dividing the job up among lots of small
PCs is a very attractive carrot for enterprise users, especially in
the current harsh economic climate. The bank's treasury, for
example, hopes to increase its current use of the processing power
provided by its 1,300 PCs from 5% to at least 15% when it rolls the
grid computing model out across the division.
However, there can be hidden costs - beyond the initial outlay
users will be required to invest in a middleware layer. "In terms
of business implementation there will always be an integration
cost," warns Joseph Orlando, director of PwC's Menlo Park centre.
This will, he says, affect return on investment and people need to
be aware of this and factor such costs into their business cases to
help to manage expectations.
Some companies and organisations are bound to be unwilling to share
their resources with their rivals and will be fearful of opening up
access to their information. However, the global nature of the
model will at least encourage them to link up the PCs in their
local office or different branches onto a grid network.
The technology to set up these local grids is available now - the
concept harks back to the idea of clustering IT kit, which is far
from new. It is this that PwC sees happening over the next few
years. "The inter-organisational grid will come later," says
Findlay.
According to Orlando, grid computing is at the point where wireless
application protocol was four or five years ago. Although the
technology is available there are not many organisations which have
found a real economic benefit for adopting it. "The guy who really
needs it is the guy who does not have the money - the small- to
medium-sized enterprise," Orlando says.
As ever, a key problem will be security. Users who are part of a
grid will be running data from other machines and potentially data
from other companies. There are worries that the "agent" needed on
each PC to monitor for idle processing power could be hijacked.
Others have voiced fears that hackers and cyberterrorists will use
the grid computing model to join forces and mount more powerful and
damaging attacks.
The commoditisation of IT may be further achieved through another
development that is still some way off but definitely achievable.
This is where the Internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous, to a
point where we have "IP dial-tone", the Internet Protocol
equivalent of the standard telephone network.
PwC predicts that the current situation, where Voice over IP (VoIP)
networks are like islands surrounded by a sea of standard telephone
networks, will be transformed to a point where VoIP will be used on
an end-to-end basis. This may take some time, says PwC, and will
require significant investment in equipment, while established
carriers may drag their feet if they perceive it not to be in their
interests.
However, Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at the
University of California - interviewed for the PwC report - says
that IP dial-tone is "coming very quickly". He claims General
Packet Radio Service is almost an IP dial-tone.
He says there are still some key issues to resolve, such as
pricing, services and who will run it, but if these are ironed out
it could have grave consequences for all those carriers that
invested heavily in third generation (3G) licences. "3G is going to
have a very hard time coming to life and it may end up being a
technology that fails," Kleinrock says.
The increased use of wireless Lans could cannibalise demand for 3G
mobile services over the next few years, says PwC, and 3G operators
will have to move into the Wi-Fi space to survive. The process has
already begun, with the increase in wireless hotspots in locations
like airport lounges, hotels and coffee shops, although they are a
lot more prevalent in the US than in Europe. The PwC report also
forecasts that the way that organisations satisfy their IT needs
will change.
Companies can already outsource their IT function, or use managed
services or an application service provider-type models instead of
investing in technology and applications themselves. In the future,
says PwC, businesses will increasingly access such resources from a
third-party in the same way that they access public utility
services like water or electricity, where they are billed based on
what they use.
According to PwC, the rise of computing as a utility represents an
additional model for the way grid computing could be used at
enterprise level, with intelligent middleware allocating computing
resources on the grid to help to satisfy service level agreements
and quality of service policies.
Naturally there are barriers to the drive towards commoditisation
and key aspects like grid computing and computing as a utility.
According to the PwC report, the hardest problems to solve will be
software-related - infrastructure and hardware issues should be
fairly straightforward. Findlay says new standards and software
will be required to allow the formation of a single infrastructure
and to achieve the vision of a truly distributed operating system.
On the plus side, grid computing has already received the backing
of major suppliers such as IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft,
which are all developing software for it. Open source options are
also being developed and both Findlay and Orlando believe there
could be big opportunities for Linux as grids go
inter-organisational and global, allowing organisations to adapt
the source code and develop their own software to aid collaboration
and integration.
How accurate the PwC forecast turns out to be remains to be seen
but at least it should provide IT directors with food for
thought.
PwC report summary - key points in future of Internet
- The key emerging trends in IT infrastructure will be
"commoditisation, scalability, flexibility, reliability and
manageability", incorporating grid computing and computing as a
utility
- The grid computing model will eventually amalgamate computing
resources from heterogeneous systems run by different
organisations. This will boost demand for open source software like
Linux
- Computing, communications and information will become available
anywhere and everywhere
- These resources will be accessed and billed in the same way as
other public utility services like water and gas
- They will eventually become pervasive to the point where they
become an invisible part of everyday life
- The Internet will become as prevalent as the telephone network,
where you can simply pick up a handset and dial, leading to the
advent of IP dial-tone.
PwC's technology forecasts
Volume one of the forecast,
published earlier this year, looked at developments and future
trends in enterprise applications such as enterprise resource
planning and supply chain management along with issues such as
integration.
Volume two looks at the IT environments in which those applications
run.
The next edition, scheduled for early 2003, will look at
information security. The forecast is now in its 14th year.