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January 2009 Edition
The Business Track during EGEE'08 in Turkey last autumn brought into sharp focus the headway being made through the business programme. This 2-day event placed special emphasis on gLite adoption and EGEE Business Associate (EBA) success stories, challenges and opportunities across diverse sectors, and the relation between grids and emerging technologies like cloud computing and virtualisation, bringing multiple perspectives from analysts, business experts and the research community. A special report in this issue offers an overview of the main highlights of the Business Track. The EBA programme is an important
component in this development plan. Interviews with two new
Business Associates, Nick Trigg, CEO of Constellation
Technologies (UK) and Steve Adams, Managing Director of Linalis
(Switzerland), serve to highlight the mutual benefits of the EBA
programme and offer a sample of current and future collaborative work. The Newsletter also features the first in a series of use cases of EGEE’s open source technologies, specifically its gLite middleware. This issue’s use case centres on CCGVeritas (Compagnie Générale de Géophysique-Veritas), which is poised to market its grid-enabled technology for the oil and gas market. Collaboration between US-based Digital Ribbon and WISDOM ,a global initiative for discovering new medicines, provides an interesting case study on the potential to transform the way users send jobs on clouds or grids reported on in this issue. It has been a positive year for EGEE and
Business and 2009 looks to be exciting and challenging as we build on
these successes, with initiatives ranging from Business Days, on-site
visits to companies and the annual Business Track, with the aim of
bringing on board new users. Other key initiatives include EGEE
4th User Forum/OGF25 & OGF-Europe’s 2nd International Event,
2-6 March 2009 in Catania, Italy. This premier event in distributed
computing is an important opportunity for business and research
communities to exchange knowledge, discuss future collaborative
developments for technology transfer and understand how to synergise on
standards and interoperability. Early Bird Registration is
open until 31 January 2009. More information and registration
details are available at http://egee-uf4.eu-egee.org/. EGEE also participated at the Cloudscape
Workshop, 14-15 January 2009, Brussels. Cloudscape – A Workshop
Exploring Cloud Computing & its Impact on Enterprise IT – led
by OGF-Europe’s Industry Expert Group (IEG), which includes several
EGEE Business Associates. EGEE made a presentation on open standards
common to clouds and grids. Steven Newhouse, EGEE-III Technical
Director, was part of the high-profile panel that deliberated key
points during the Round-table that concluded the Cloudscape Workshop.
More details are included in the dedicated Event Section. -Stephanie Parker, EGEE Business Forum
Two New EGEE Business Associates
Interview with Nick Trigg,
CEO, Constellation Technologies
Constellation Technologies,
one of two new EGEE
Business Associates, is a rapidly expanding company at the
commercial forefront of both cloud and grid computing. Constellation
has developed its SuperCloud™ technology, which offers lower costs
and greater efficiency in computing requirements. The EGEE Business Forum
spoke to Nick Trigg, CEO of Constellation to find out more.
What IT challenges does cloud and grid computing address? In simple terms, cost reduction and flexible access to on-demand computing infrastructure, which means more computers when you want them and fewer when you don’t. This translates into total IT flexibility. Demand by industry for computing infrastructure is continuing to grow as businesses al increasingly carry out more detailed modelling analyses, with the aim of developing products and services that have a commercial advantage over competitors. However, the costs and challenges associated with both owning and managing large infrastructures are becoming prohibitive. This is particularly the case for companies that have fewer resources for IT innovation. Cloud computing is a promising new technology that addresses these challenges with the potential to reduce infrastructure costs, increase business flexibility and bring access to more compute power or more storage capacity. Constellation is already providing commercial level services to businesses looking at using the power of the cloud or grid computing. What is the main focus and value-add of Constellation Technologies in the current landscape? Although there are many examples of cloud or grid computing working well in the academic sphere, there are only a very few working examples in industry. This is mainly because, although the technology is robust and scalable, it has not been made easy for businesses to use. Constellation is providing just such a service to industry – to help commercial companies benefit from the advantages of the cloud using their own applications. The company is currently in discussions with several companies that are all looking to see whether the power of the Cloud can address some of their computing needs. Systems have already been designed and worked on prospective projects for customers in the pharmaceutical industry, multinational financial industry, and a media distribution company. Solutions are also possible in many other sectors – energy, metrological, chemical and many others . What is the connection between Constellation Technologies and CERN and what is the main motivation for joining the EBA programme? Constellation is a European spin-out from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) of the UK’s Science & Technology Facility Council (STFC), demonstrating the value-add of transferring the knowledge and competences developed by EGEE, particularly with regard to EGEE’s open source gLite middleware. EGEE and Constellation have joined forces to help ensure that the technology developed by EGEE reaches the mainstream, through the innovation activity at RAL and the work of other Business Associates. The advantages of the EBA programme are real and substantial. Access to early stage planning as well as a close relationship with the EGEE programme enables the company to understand the technical road map. This is of huge value when understanding the future potential of the technology. Why is EGEE's gLite a valuable asset for Constellation’s SuperCloud? gLite middleware has showed itself to be robust and resilient and work well at a global level. It is already used in one of the largest globally distributed grids in the world. Development of the technology is continuing under EGEE and the EBA programme and should be supported also under EGI (European Grid Initiative) currently being set up. This means that gLite will be around for many years to come. What achievements have been made to date? Constellation has already raised development funds, received its first contract and is in detailed negotiations with companies in a variety of commercial sectors. It has already showed that computing costs can be reduced and value can be added to the end user. What are Constellation’s plans for the near future? Constellation will continue to provide cloud services and products to a wide range of industrial sectors including pharmaceuticals, finance, media and others across Europe. Having gained valuable experience from working with industry, Constellation is in an excellent position to supply solutions to real industrial needs. Cloud computing is entering an exciting growth phase and as the company has a very strong technical position with connections into CERN and many European research facilities the future looks very exciting.  Interview with Steve Adams, Managing Director, Linalis Linalis is an Open
Source IT solution provider specialising in Infrastructure,
Collaboration and Communication, Business Intelligence, Websites and
Web application developments. Since 2002, Linalis has focused on
enabling organisations to cost effectively benefit from Open Source
assets through training, consulting, resourcing, turnkey solutions,
support and maintenance. As a new EGEE Business
Associate, the EGEE Business Forum
sat down with Steve, Managing Director at Linalis, to learn more.
Why is Linalis successful? Linalis has achieved its ongoing and more recent successes by responding to the needs of its clients and partners. This includes proposing solutions that are lower in value to itself, but higher in value to its clients, as well as ensuring that Linalis continues to expand its knowledge base in technology areas with high growth potential. How did Linalis first become involved with EGEE? Linalis has the home of the World Wide Web, and a prolific provider of open source technological advancements on its door step, CERN. Linux platforms are ideal for large-scale computing requirements including distributed computing, clustering, high availability, cloud and grid computing. Having developed many mutually beneficial relationships at CERN, Linalis was invited to become a Business Associate of EGEE to specialise in providing training and support services to other Business Partners and their clients, thus providing part of the backbone required to provide Grid computing solutions to the business community. What benefits does your role as a Business Associate bring? Being a Business Associate is of great benefit to Linalis, as it keeps us at the leading edge in Open Source technological advances, and more importantly, customer driven demand for that technology. Being a Business Associate also puts us in direct contact with other organisations in a "trusted" circle, that will allow us to further develop our partner ecosystem with like-minded organisations. What are the main drivers for training? Organisations that want to benefit from Grid technologies will want to be as self sustainable as possible for ongoing maintenance. Training IT administrators is the key to achieving this. How can potential adopters of EGEE's open source technologies benefit from training? Our clients often decide that training is the best way to find out what a new technology can provide them, and use workshop based training courses as a cost effective, "get your hands dirty" approach to technology evaluation. The training courses allow attendees to, through a series of lab sessions, use some of the tools in a grid testbed environment. What future plans do you have related to EGEE? In our experience of the Open Source, support, maintenance and training are the keys to adoption of any technology, however well developed. We therefore aim to increase the depth and breadth of the training courses available and to work with our fellow Business Associates to ensure that their technology is well supported and maintained for the Grid user base. Our mission is to enable organisations to benefit from Open Source technologies and this provides us with a focus on delivering cost effective solutions, to "Make IT happen". EGEE'08 Business Track - Driving Grid Adoption, Fostering IT Innovation 22-23
September 2008 Istanbul, Turkey The EGEE ’08 Business
Track organised by the EGEE Business Forum
was the third in a successful series of dedicated sessions designed to
bring the benefits of Grid and related technologies to the attention of
businesses that have not yet looked at these for their innovation. The Business Track connected Grid experts, end users and IT innovators to explore new opportunities for the adoption of distributed computing by engaging with EGEE through set processes designed to promote industrial involvement and collaborative developments.
The various sessions addressed areas of
interest to the international business community, exploring trends in
distributed computing as we move towards new frontiers. In the Business
Track Open Plenary, talks featured Erwin Laure, EGEE Technical
Director; Charles Brett from Forrester; and David Sinclair, Imense, a
UK-based SME. The increasing interest surrounding Cloud Computing, and
its relation to Grids, made the Business Track and a conference keynote
especially timely. On Wednesday, 24 September, Peter Vosshall, Vice
President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon.com presented “Web Scale
Computing: The Power of Infrastructure as a Service.” The Business Track Session on Clouds and
Grids explored the sea-change surrounding Cloud Computing and how it
fits in the bigger Grid picture. The Business Track also featured
sessions dedicated to Data Management & Virtualization; Modelling
& Simulation; and Grid Economics & Business Models.
Participants gained new knowledge on:
For more information on the EGEE’08
Business Track and to download presentations, please visit: To keep up-to-date with the latest developments of grid and industry join the EGEE Business Forum at: /eu-egee-org/BusinessForumMember For more information about the EGEE Business Forum visit: /eu-egee-org/index.pl?id=132 or contact egee@trust-itservices.com
gLite Use case – A CGGVeritas Solution for the Oil and Gas Market CGGVeritas (Compagnie
Générale de Géophysique-Veritas), a provider of on-line and on-demand
services, specifically seismic processing and reservoir simulation, is
one of the first businesses to develop an industrial application with
using EGEE’s
gLite. CGGVeritas is now poised to market its grid-enabled
services, bringing potentially huge benefits primarily to the large
number of SMEs operating in this sector. The company has successfully developed both the software, Geocluster, and a sister application, Reservoir Simulation, operating in a grid environment using gLite and leveraging EngineFrame user interface developed by NICE, an EGEE Business Associate, enabling the easy development of web access. The solution offers value-add in terms of solving complex problems for clients, storage issues, as well as validating innovative algorithms on real size data sets. But it doesn’t stop here, the solution also provides a framework for industry-research collaboration, including training and know-how transfer. “Beyond the ability to process data more quickly, without the need to manage new IT hardware and software, clients can access data wherever and whenever and can easily and effectively work with distant colleagues”, says Gaël Youinou, software manager at CGGVeritas. The business advantages speak for themselves: increased flexibility, shortening time to market and speeding up the decision-making process. Additionally, pay-per-use means that businesses manage their budgets more effectively. CGGVeritas will sell the application software as a package or a service. CGGVeritas has used EGEE’s gLite middleware to develop a separate infrastructure specifically for businesses, offering their service via a web portal. “Everything is set for our sales team,” says Youinou. “I expect that the first contracts with clients will be signed before the end of the year (2008).” If you would like more information on Geocluster or how to run an application using gLite or on the EGEE infrastructure, please contact - egee@trust-itservices.com or visit the Geocluster page at: http://www.cggveritas.com/Geocluster or EGEE Business Applications at: /eu-egee-org/index.pl?id=319 gLite Use Case - Digital Ribbon: Towards Computing as a Commodity “Computing is moving towards becoming
a commodity,” says Erik Weaver, Digital
Ribbon’s CEO, “however it is much more complex than the oft-cited
example of electricity.” Key requirements for computing consumers
include not just power, but also bandwidth, connectivity, that is, the
speed at which processing cores can talk to each other, and memory.
“Having enough resources available at the right time is key”, adds
Weaver.
Digital Ribbon, which aims to be a kind of clearing house for computational resources, is a US-based service registry company covering a multitude of platforms, processors and architectures that offers resources to both the private and public sectors. The company uses its “service registry” model to connect resource consumers with the right resource providers. This approach has the potential to transform the way users are currently running jobs on clouds or grids. Having more options could be a great advantage to users. “We are always looking for ways to link user communities, applications and resource providers,” says Bob Jones, Project Director of EGEE. Early this summer, WISDOM, a global initiative for discovering new medicines for neglected and emerging diseases, ran a test using EGEE’s gLite middleware on Digital Ribbon resources. The trial run was aimed at paving the way for an effective EGEE and Digital Ribbon collaboration, with an eye to pinpointing additional areas of co-operation. WISDOM harnesses the power of grid computing to look for drug candidates to treat specific diseases. Drug development is a very expensive process, but grid technology and collaboration between partners in academia and industry can significantly cut costs for its initial step. Data used for the test consisted of 750 chemical dockings—potential candidates for diabetes drugs. In about 12 hours they ran calculations corresponding to 55 days on a single processing unit. While the trial run used a relatively small set of calculations, it helped test new ways of sending jobs, pointing to a new window of opportunity for EGEE. Jean Salzemann, computing researcher with the WISDOM collaboration, explains, “We test millions of potential drugs in our data challenges. Ideally we would have access to one core per potential drug or ‘ligand.’ With this we would have the complete results in about an hour. When we are preparing future data challenges, we could consider splitting the data load between EGEE and Digital Ribbon resources.” “This successful test with WISDOM shows that applications within EGEE can run well on Digital Ribbon resources,” says Bob Jones. “Now we can see if other user communities might benefit.” If you would like more information on how to run an application using gLite or on the EGEE infrastructure, please contact - egee@trust-itservices.com or visit the EGEE Business Applications page at: /eu-egee-org/index.pl?id=319 Images courtesy of sxc.hu Evaluating the Potential of EGEE’s OS Technologies for your Business One-to-one
site visits are an important opportunity for companies to understand
how they can leverage EGEE’s open source grid technologies to meet
specific business challenges, such as satisfying compute and IT
resource needs, speeding up time to market and enabling the development
of new products and services. Experts from the EGEE Business Task
force will help companies analyse their IT needs in the short to
medium term and define the paths to adoption through a managed support
process. Why choose gLite? EGEE’s gLite
is production quality middleware distributed under a business friendly
open source Apache-2 licence. gLite, which has been tested on a large
scale, provides an application programme interface (API) to both
higher-level services and foundation grid middleware. gLite follows
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), making it easy to connect software
with other grid services and is compliant with web service
interoperability.
EGEE offers full user support to new adopters through a managed process from the first contact through to production usage, offering training, expertise in grid-enabling applications and networking events across Europe. How can businesses get started? Site visits are designed to
facilitate time-pressured business leaders and IT managers. They are
open to any company interested in discussing their current business and
technology needs and understanding whether grid adoption could bring
tangible benefits to their company. Special emphasis is placed on
analysing current requirements, explaining EGEE’s technological focus
in simple, business-friendly terms, and outlining the full range of
support services available.
The first series of Site Visits
target France and Italy with focused meetings taking place on the
company’s premises or at Technology Parks, bringing together several
companies that could benefit from adopting EGEE’s gLite, without
needing to travel to a special venue.
Site Visits are organised by EGEE’s Business Forum. Companies from all European countries are invited to request a focused meeting by contacting egee@trust-itservices.com, specifying the size of the company; sector focus; location; current IT requirements and proposed timeframe for the Site Visit. IGT2008 - World Summit of Cloud Computing: 1-2 Dec 08
Over the last few years we have seen
grid computing evolve from a niche technology associated with
scientific and technical computing, into a business-innovating
technology that is driving increased commercial adoption. Grid
deployments accelerate application performance, improve productivity
and collaboration, and optimize the resiliency of the IT
infrastructure. Today, the maturity of the
Virtualization technologies, both at the VM and at the IT
infrastructure levels, and the convergence of the Grid, Virtualization
and SOA concepts, enables the business implementation of the Cloud
Computing for utility and SaaS services. At last, the Grid Computing
vision becomes a reality: people that get electricity from their
electrical outlet, on-demand, can get applications, computing and
storage services from the network, on-demand. We can dynamically scale
our computation and storage power, at anytime, and we pay only for what
we use. This is going to change the marketplace as we know it. The IGT Annual event IGT2008 focused on Cloud Computing, and its impact on the enterprise IT, the next generation data centre, SaaS and Utility Computing. video and presentations are now available online:http://video.new-app.com/customers/grid/IGT2008/main.html For more information visit: http://www.cloudcomputing.org.il/ Cloudscape - A Workshop Exploring Cloud Computing and its Impact on Enterprise IT: 14-15 Jan 09 As service oriented architectures become
increasingly more common and the benefits of Cloud Computing come into
sharper focus, the first OGF-Europe Industry Expert Workshop explored
the impact of clouds on enterprise IT and how it is shaping the overall
distributed computing landscape. Taking place 14-15 January in Brussels and timed to kick off as SSOKU09 concluded, the event provided a forum for focused discussions on the broad set of technologies and solutions that fall under the umbrella terms of Cloud and Distributed Computing. Experts brought insight into the experiences of current adoption, the services offered by cloud providers, as well as key, on-going initiatives in Europe and around the world to assess future trends. Presentations are now available at: http://www.ogfeurope.eu/Cloudscape Check out all of the
conclusions from the day on the Grid
Cast blog covering topics such as: Drivers 3 years from now, The
future success of Clouds including key predictions, Impact on Green IT,
and Challenges Today
For more information, contact info@ogfeurope.eu EGEE 4th User
Forum / OGF25 & OGF-Europe's 2nd International Event, 2-6 Mar 09
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