More than 500 participants have attended the BEinGRID Industry Days, an event organised by the BEinGRID project (Business Experiments in GRID), part of the EU's sixth research Framework Programme. The event, which took place from 3-5 June in Barcelona, demonstrated how Grid technologies can be applied by businesses to solve a variety of challenges.
Keynote speakers Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, and Diego Pavia, CEO of ATOS Origin Iberia, discussed the role of Grid and service-oriented architecture in the market today and offered their perspectives on the role of utility-like provision in the business infrastructure of tomorrow, as well as what the future holds with the surge of 'cloud computing' – an entwined concept that realises much of the on-demand, utility computing vision that inspired the original '(electricity) Grid' metaphor.
The BEinGRID philosophy rests in the belief that widespread adoption of Grid computing in a commercial sector can be triggered by a critical mass of successful use cases. Among others, Platform, GridSystems, Layer7 Technologies and Axiomatics described the experiences of their firms in providing successful Grid solutions.
Several demonstrations from innovative Grid applications reinforced the Industrial and Grid experts' testimonies about cutting edge solutions designed around the end user to solve real business challenges through the application of Grid technologies.
For the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) sector, for example, a Grid pilot has been developed in BEinGRID by the National Technical University of Athens, involving ICON, an independent computer-aided engineering technology and process consultancy and OpenCFD, who provide contracted development for the Open-FOAM open source CFD toolbox. According to Francisco Campos, senior consulting engineer at ICON: 'ICON is pleased to exploit the benefits of the Grid as an end user in the BEinGRID Business Experiments. We see Grid technologies as a key enabler for CFD to impact the effectiveness and productivity of SME companies and original equipment manufacturers alike.'
