BEinGRID

BEinGRID (Business Experiments in Grid) is a research project partly funded by the European Commission as an Integrated Project under the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) sponsorship program. Started in June 1 2006, the project will run 42 months, until December 2009. The project is coordinated by Atos Origin.According to the project factsheet, their mission is "to establish effective routes to foster the adoption of Grid Computing across the EU and to stimulate research into innovative business models using Grid technologies."

Vis-à-vis other FP6 research programs, it is significant not only for its long duration, but also for its budget, which at 24.8 million Euros, is the largest of any FP6 integrated project. Of this, 15.7 million is provided by the European commission and the remainder by its 95 contributing partner companies.

BEinGRID is different from many Grid computing projects, in that while the latter that often seek to solve concrete technical problems, BEinGRID sets out to provide the infrastructure to support pilot implementations of Grid technologies in actual business scenarios. These pilot cases include scenarios in sectors such as computational fluid dynamics, architectural rendering, ship building and video gaming. The business case for Grid technologies in these pilots also varies: in some cases it provides cost reduction, in others enhanced processing power, and in others still it enables new business models to be employed: such as running applications as Software-as-a-Service, SaaS, with variable number of computing nodes.

To extract best practice and common themes from the experimental implementations, two groups of consultants are analysing the pilots, one technical, one business. The results of these cross analyses are provided by the website [http://www.gridipedia.eu/ Gridipedia] .Eighteen business experiments were carried in the initial stage of the project. A second wave of seven experiements was initiated on the 17th of March, 2008.

The outcome of the project are a series of success stories from the take-up of Grid solutions by the businesses represented in the project. In addition, the project was the birthplace of the Gridipedia website. Dubbed the European Grid marketplace, it serves as a reference point to the Grid computing communituy, with its collection of reports and best practices, a glossary of distributed computing terminolgy, a description of Grid middleware platforms and downloads of components developed by the European Grid computing research scene. With this the project expects to stimulate the long-term take-up of Grid solutions by European business.

The consortium of 96 partners, led by Atos Origin, is drawn from across the European Union and represents the leading Grid research organisations committed to its business use and a broad spectrum of companies keen to assess the benefits to their productivity, competitiveness and profitability from their use of Grid solutions. The partnership in the business experiment pilots cuts across the full value chain of the targeted economic sector; from technology providers to different level users

The BEinGRID project showcased its initial results at the Industry Days event in Barcelona, Spain in June 2008. This event was collocated with the Open Grid Forum's OGF23 event and attracted over 500 attendees [http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2382520.html BEinGRID Demos Business Grid Successes ] ] . The 3 days of the event covered success stories from the project including on the emerging role of the Gridipedia portal and the use of Grid technology in computational fluid dynamics. and in architectural modelling. The event was also attended by keynote speakers including Werner Vogels, Vice president of Amazon.com, Diego Pavia, CEO of Atos Origin Spain, Charles Brett of Forrester, Carl Kesselman, Director of Univa and Paul Strong, research scientist at eBay. [ [http://www.gridcomputingplanet.com/article.php/3751411 Grid Computing Planet: Grid Trends Highlight Barcelona Conference ] ]

An image of the BEinGRID Industry Days Event

References

External links

* [http://www.beingrid.eu/ BEinGRID home page]
* [http://www.gridipedia.eu/ Gridipedia]
* [http://www.ogf.org/OGF23/ OGF23]

See also:
Grid computing