Foreword

by Ian Foster, Head of Distributed Systems Lab, Argonne National Laboratory, original proponent of the term Grid Computing and head of the Globus project and
Carl Kesselman, Director of Center for Grid Technologies, University of Southern California, co-author of the Globus Project, a number of Grid research projects and numerous publications:

Like many disruptive technologies before it, such as the Internet and Web, the Grid was initially motivated by the needs of scientists. Originally designed to facilitate access to high-end computational resources such as supercomputers, the Grid quickly expanded to enable sharing of a wide range of resources including storage, networks, and scientific instruments such as microscopes, x-rRay sources, and earthquake engineering test facilities. Common to all of these applications was the need to form and maintain distributed virtual communities within which resources could be pooled and applied to common problems.

As the Grid enters its second decade, its applications are extending far beyond these pioneering scientific users. The need to share resources to achieve common goals turns out to be fundamental to commerce as well as science. Whether Be it to support business processes across partners in a supply chain, to facilitate collaborative engineering among subcontractors, or to enable higher utilization of resources spread across business units, the resource sharing provided by Grid technologies is are becoming increasingly critical to a wide range of business and commercial activities.

As the Grid crosses the boundary from elite scientific research into mainstream business, the supporting literature needs to change and support the new audience. So far, the Grid has been described primarily in scientific articles. The few books that have been published on the subject have been written in technical language and directed to an academic audience or to developers ready to get down in the trenches.

For these reasons, this is a timely book: the savvy manager needs to know about the Grid, what makes it tick, and how it can be used in their organization to decrease costs, improve performance, and enable business processes that would otherwise be intractable. Pawel Plaszczak and Richard Wellner take on the brave task of addressing this need, and provide first ever comprehensive, yet compact work directed to CEOs, IT managers, planners and decision makers, and those who are interested in deploying and using the Grid paradigm without necessarily programming it. They explain why Grid is important, and provide the information needed to evaluate whether a transition to Grid is right for you, and how to plan such a move.

The authors of this book are particularly well qualified to make the case for Grid computing to the business IT manager. Both have been intimately involved in developing and deploying Grid technology and applications for many years. Pawel and Richard have both been major contributors to the open source Globus Toolkit, the most widely used Grid infrastructure to date In addition to their deep knowledge of the fundamental technology, they have both also been pa of the commercial sector, developing applications of Grid technology with major corporations.

In this book, Pawel and Richard provide the background knowledge that the savvy manager needs to understand the potential of the Grid for their organization. A rich assortment of case studies illustrates the range of problems that the Grid is being used to solve, and will aid the reader in identifying which of their problems are “Grid” problems. These case studies also show how to get started, and introduce the steps that should be followed to incorporate the Grid into your existing IT infrastructures.

The impact of the Grid is already being felt, as corporations roll out large deployments and ISVs start to Grid-enable their products. However, “you ain’t seen nothing yet”: we the next ten years will be exciting indeed, and seem likely to lead to radical changes in the way that we interact with our IT infrastructure. With this book, you, the “savvy manager” can understand how to gain benefits today, and how to be prepared for the future. We think that you will find it an interesting and useful read.

About the online companion

chapter 1, page 5

We plan to maintain an online book counterpart that includes the errata, community portal, and new material complementary to the printed edition, ensuring that the reader is kept up to date. There are at least three reasons for us to maintain the online companion.

• Firstly, the topic is very new. We acknowledge that there may be errors in the printed material, although we took care to minimize such errors with great help from our reviewers. The errata, if any, will appear online.
• Secondly, Grid technology is rapidly evolving and new business offerings reach the market every month. In the online companion we will keep track of the products that appeared on the market after this book was printed.
• Thirdly, there are many definitions of Grid computing and some sections of this book will inevitably raise strong feelings of those with different understanding of the subject. They can voice their opinions and discuss them with others.