Grid Applications: From Early Adopters to Mainstream Users

Abstract

Grid computing has gained widespread attention, both in academic and commercial settings. As a result, the development of grid middleware infrastructure has made tremendous progress. But still, grids are mostly deployed by early adopters, asking for the move to the more mainstream users. The Global Grid Forum (GGF) is a community-initiated forum working on grid technologies. GGF’s primary objective is to promote and support the development, deployment, and implementation of grid technologies and applications via the creation and documentation of "best practices" – technical specifications, user experiences, and implementation guidelines. The special issue presented here is the result of the joined efforts of two of GGF’s research groups. The Application Developers and Users Research Group (APPS-RG) seeks to facilitate the exploitation of grid technologies by application developers and users, and to attract new application domains to the grid. The Production Grid Services Research Group (PGS-RG) seeks to document experiences and identify best practices guiding organizations moving a grid to the persistent level. The group also explores new paradigms in supporting grids that aspire to become large scale grids with a large user or application base. Together, the two groups aim at bridging the gap between early adopters of grids and the more mainstream use of grid technology. For fostering mature production environments, incentives by application users are vital. For this purpose, APPS-RG and PGS-RG had decided to organize a workshop which was held in conjunction with the GGF14 meeting, June 27, 2005, in Chicago, USA. We were seeking experience from early adoptors who would like to become mainstream users, from mainstream users who would like to use grids, from those who already do, and from middleware developers and system operators in charge of providing working grid environments to user communities. From the submissions, the programme committee selected eleven papers to be presented at the workshop. Together with two open discussion sessions, the presentations formed a highly interesting and inspiring assessment of the current state of grids maturing towards production quality. The workshop pro-