Sustainable and Interoperable e-Infrastructures for Research and Business

Abstract

Grid computing allows for the creation of e-infrastructures providing computational power and information storage capabilities needed both by present and future research centres around the world. Although the value of Grids is recognised by its early users, many companies, which would benefit from the adoption of this new paradigm, are still waiting claiming that Grid technologies are still not wellestablished and continuously evolving. A company usually takes a risk when it adopts a technology before its standardisation because if the technology subsequently demonstrates to diverge from (de-facto) standards then the investments can be partially lost and, additionally, switching to the new standard technology will probably be more expensive. In this chapter we present a couple of approaches which allow existing Grid infrastructures to evolve, by including newer Grid middleware, and consequently preserve the investment made on the infrastructure. The capability to evolve reduces current problems of Grid implementation (especially the lack of standards), so it makes Grid adoption by business companies and research centres painless.