S&S Technology Today

Currently two streams are nourishing the S & S landscape: Grid computing and the service orientation of today’s Software Engineering.

The grand vision of Grid computing can be compared to power grids: users get access to electricity through wall sockets with no care or consideration about where or how the electricity is actually generated. From this point of view computing becomes pervasive, seamless and invisible. Individual users or client applications gain access to computing resources like processors, storage, data and applications with little or no knowledge of where those resources are located or what the underlying technologies are. This grand vision of Grid computing supports all the Ambient Intelligence Scenarios of Framework Programme 6 (FP6). If we consider this as an ultimate goal, there are many smaller steps that need to be taken to achieve it. These smaller steps are in the focus of ECSS.

Today we are seeing Grid coming through its first manifestation as a high performance computing platform to an acceptance by businesses that Grid can be architecture for business flexibility. But the speed of this transformation depends on how deep Grid is linked with the paradigm of service orientation. In the perception of many European SMEs, Grids are only tailored to big IT enterprise. But is this true? This might just be a snapshot of today’s implementation status. The future will show, that with Grids SMEs will have application services and collaboration platforms at their fingertips that were previously impossible.