BAEgrid: From e-Science to e-Engineering

The BAE SYSTEMS Advanced Technology Centre is currently constructing a prototype Grid infrastructure “BAEgrid”. BAEgrid is designed as an in-house “laboratory” in which we can exercise grid concepts, capabilities and tools to develop and evaluate a range of Grid-enabled business scenarios. This is facilitated by our close relationship with the world-leading UK e-Science programme, and is being implemented in collaboration with several major hardware and software vendors. Grid technology in its current form is ready to be deployed in areas of compute-intensive activity and can demonstrably improve efficiency of deployed IT assets within a single organisational domain. However, the big pay-off from Grid is in the collaborative “Virtual Organisation” area. Here we are engaging with several e-Science projects to test existing capabilities, and gain insight into the requirements for future work. This paper gives a brief overview of the current status of the BAEgrid, and some of the collaborations now running. Our experience demonstrates the importance of the involvement of the end-user community in the development of Grid. We identify three topics as crucial to the success of Grid in a business environment: security (the fundamental enabler), semantics (the key to interoperability at the applications level) and human factors (central to effective collaboration).