[ogsa-wg] Glossary terms: enterprise, enterprise computing and e-Science

[Donal K. Fellows]

Toshiyuki Nakata wrote:
> How about numerically intensive applications used in the enterprises such as
> Cirucuit simulation, financial calculations such as Risk analysis?

Also, heavy-duty floating-point simulation codes (of the general sort
often associated with e-Science) are very useful for many fields of
engineering. They also have extensive requirements for things like
visualization and steering.

Looks to me like almost anything can be called "Enterprise Grid
Computing" and so the term isn't helping us understand what is going on
from a Grid perspective. Glossaries definitely should not be muddying
the waters, whatever else they do.

The way I've seen the term "Enterprise Grid Computing" actually used in
presentations though is much more restrictive: "Managed Datacenter Grid
Computing" would probably be an accurate characterization. Were we to
use that term, it would leave the EGC term free to mean "all grid
computing that is supporting an enterprise", of which MDGC is an
important sub-category. In doing that, it would make it far easier to
reach out to other kinds of enterprises where the major grid challenges
are not in datacenter management; one of the things I hear from talking
to people who consider themselves to be working on a "Mobile Grid" is
that "GGF/OGSA only deals with HPC and datacenters" which I know to be
not true - those are merely areas that have been focussed on initially.

Donal (I know it's OGF now, but they don't.)