savas parastatidis

Utility computing centre closes

TheRegister reports that HP has killed its “utility computing experiment”. Was this doomed to fail or was it ahead of its time?

I always believed that “Grid computing” was more about hype, politics, and marketing rather than technology. Here at Newcastle we’d like to think “Grid computing” as an application of the distributed computing ideas at large-scale. We like to talk in terms of Internet-scale computing using existing infrastructures and technologies.

So, will the hyped “Grid” have the same fate as HP‘s attempt to commercialise utility computing? Only time will tell.

I am interested in people’s views on this.

3 responses to “Utility computing centre closes”

  1. Jim Webber
    Well then I’m glad I’m not physically in Newcastle. I’ve decided that Grid is about virtualisation of hardware. SOA is about virtualising software (sort of). The does away with the horrible overloading of the term “Grid.”
  2. Savas Parastatidis
    Jim, you know that I agree with you about SOAs but I don’t agree with your definition of the term “Grid”, making it only about the virtualisation of hardware. The kind of applications and the user experience that the “Grid” folks have in mind are all about distributed computing at large scale (e.g., virtual organisations, contracts, policies, etc.). The same stuff that we’ve been talking about in SOAs, the same stuff that Santosh’s Distributed Computing group has been doing for years, nothing new. However, they don’t just try to virtualise hardware. But even if that was the case, why wouldn’t a service-oriented approach to achieving this “virtualisation” be enough? SOAs and “virtualisation” (whatever that means) are orthogonal. You can use SOAs to achieve “virtualisation”. No?
  3. Mark Little
    If you talk to HP you’ll be told that it isn’t dead, but has been restructured across a couple of groups to take into account changing customer requirements. The alternative view, to paraphrase monty-python: It’s pining for the fjords. It is an ex-UDC. It has ceased to be. Cue the Lumberjack Song.