1. Defining the Grid Fabrizio Gagliardi EMEA Director Technical Computing
4/29/2019 3:10 PM
Defining the Grid
Fabrizio Gagliardi
EMEA Director
Technical Computing
Microsoft Corporation
© 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.

2. ‘Grids’: A Catch-All Term
‘Grids’ mean many different things to many different people/companies:
P2P desktop cycle-stealing
Linked Supercomputer Centers
Managed virtual distributed clusters
Internet access to giant, distributed repositories
Virtualization of data center IT resources
Out-sourcing to “utility compute centers”
Sharing resources distributed among different administrative domains (Ian Foster)
For Microsoft, Grids are about Data Management as much as Compute Cycles

3. A more personal definition
Essential to the success of the Grid is the existence of a widely distributed community sharing common goals, prepared to share resources (including human resources and skills) to address and solve common problems which require computing capacity exceeding the limits of more conventional distributed systems (distributed clusters, remote access to SC centres, etc…) and all this in the most dynamic possible way…
Particle physics is a good example which added to the above requirements a chronic lack of adequate funding and a tradition to take risks and break with more established IT solutions…

4. The EGEE Grid www.eu-egee.org 4/29/2019 3:10 PM
Resources mostly provided by HEP institutes, good example of a community distributed world-wide, focus on common goals and with computing requirements which greatly exceed the computing capacity of single computing centers including CERN
© 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.

5. Current trends
We discussed yesterday the issues of processor VLSI technology limits and the need for new radical changes in CPU architecture
This will have a cascade effect in the entire chain from the processor all the way to the final end-user application
Multi-core processors will require multi-thread support on chip, in the O/S, in the compiler and in the overall S/W development environment and application
The Grid computing model is by its nature a good match with this evolution at a macroscopic level

6. Evolution will leverage IT Industry’s Existing trends and R&D
Parallel applications development
High-productivity IDEs
Integrated debugging/profiling/tracing/analysis
Code designer wizards
Concurrent programming frameworks
Platform optimizations
Dynamic, profile-guided optimization
New programming abstractions
Distributed systems issues
Web Services & HPC grids
Security
Interoperability
Scalability
Dynamic Systems Management
Self (re)configuration & tuning
Reliability & availability
RDMS + data mining
Ease-of-use
Advanced indexing & query processing
Advanced data mining algorithms
Digital experimentation
Collaboration-enhanced Office productivity tools
Structure experiment data and derived results in a manner appropriate for human reading/reasoning (as opposed to optimizing for query processing and/or storage efficiency)
Enable collaboration among colleagues
(Scientific) workflow environments
Automated orchestration
Visual scripting
Provenance

7. Where Grids will be in 5 years? (from SC’05 panel)
Like in the past ES, AI, networking, OS Grid will disappear from the hot research (and hype) space and become mainstream technology
Major Grids already work in production
Major IT vendors will integrate Grid middleware in their standard products
ISPs will offer a wide range of services Grid based
A full mature market will develop for these services
Computing and data resources will become commodities on the Internet
The result will be a tremendous computing and data processing power to enable new scientific applications and generate opportunities for business applications
A potential leveler for a worldwide science and economy
Digital Divide could be moderated
and time will tell how wrong we are in our predictions now…