Slashdot on Wednesday November 19

In recent months, the concept of 'cloud computing' was all the buzz. European researchers think about another name, the World Wide Grid, which could run on top of the Internet. In an article to appear soon, ICT Results will report about the g-Eclipse project. As the scientists said, 'the g-Eclipse project aims to build an integrated workbench framework to access the power of existing Grid infrastructures. The framework will be built on top of the reliable eco-system of the Eclipse community to enable a sustainable development.' The project started in July 2006 and was successfully completed in June 2008 for a total cost of 2.5 million including a EU contribution of 1.96 million.

From the article

The dream of using the internet to allow people to access as much computer processing and storage power as they need, when they need it, is a step closer thanks to European researchers.

Although a World Wide Grid running on top of the internet is still probably years away from being a reality, the grid, like the web before it, is starting to take shape between academic and scientific institutions.

Where the internet is a communications channel between computers, the grid goes beyond this by not just using the internet for communications but also as a means of sharing computing resources. Every computer and user can access and make use of the combined resources of the grid.

As things stand at the moment there are a series of isolated grids which allow the resources of clusters of computers, at different universities for instance, to be shared. Each of these grids is usually based on its own proprietary middleware which makes interoperability impossible. Middleware is a type of software which connects hardware resources to a grid.

There are different middlewares available, each tailored for different scientific, commercial or industrial usage.

Another barrier to the development of the grid system is its difficulty of use, requiring as it does now knowledge of specialised computer languages and coding skills.

It is against this background that the EU-funded g-Elipse project has been developing an easy-to-use, Windows-like graphical interface which allows access to grid resources with a few mouse clicks.