[drmaa-wg] Fwd: William Fellows on the Year Ahead in Grid Computing

[Peter Troeger]

Here an excerpt from GRIDtoday. For me, DRMAA seems to be a perfect  
counter-example ;-) ...

Regards,
Peter.


> SPECIAL FEATURES  
> ==============================================================
>
> [ ] M545661 ) William Fellows on the Year Ahead in Grid Computing
>               By Derrick Harris, Editor
>
...
>   Gt: What can we expect in the field of standards throughout the  
> year?
>   Will the oft-maligned standards community finally get its act  
> together
>   and develop some widely adoptable standards?
>
>   FELLOWS: The world of standards has contributed very little to
>   commercial, enterprise Grid computing. The proliferation of Grid
>   industry bodies only means more confusion, not less, and has  
> throttled
>   momentum. The standards that do exist today are not relevant and  
> there
>   is no evidence that standards are being used in implementations or
>   that any product is being built using them. If grids can find a  
> place
>   in one of the open source stacks, such as LAMP, it would undoubtedly
>   help further adoption.
...
>   Gt: Where do end-users play into the standards debate? Will we begin
>   to see a strong interoperability push from major end-users?
>
>   FELLOWS: Looking at actual implementations, early adopters don't
>   appear -- by and large -- to care much about standards, except those
>   de facto ones that reign in particular markets such as Oracle and
>   Linux. But, ask early adopters what they want, and they typically  
> want
>   standardization of the stack and APIs like data input/output. They
>   want one set of standards and one stack. Not multiple. They say the
>   growing number of Grid industry bodies suggests confusion and  
> growing
>   complexity in approach, not standardization.
>
...
>   In some sectors, there are de facto standards, but there is no Grid
>   stack yet. In other sectors, users are pressuring suppliers to
>   integrate. Major banks have asked Platform Computing and DataSynapse
>   to create a plan to allow their respective middleware to share
>   resources. Presently, the two require dedicated resources.