Organizational and Governance Challenges for Grid Computing in Companies - Summary of Findings from Business Experiments

Grid computing originated in eScience where it is applied to support scientific tasks requiring high performance computing and collaborative scientific efforts. The Business Experiments presented in chapters 9 to 12 and the remaining 21 experimentsof the BEinGRID project (BEinGRID Booklet 2009) demonstrated the applicability of Grid computing in business environments and provided an outlook towards the application of Cloud computing in companies. Besides illustrating and testing technical Grid innovations and developments specifically dedicated to business usage of Grids, services and an outlook to Cloud computing, the Business Experiments provided an insight of the potential benefits and challenges of these technologies for business purposes. One benefit of Grid computing for companies is enabling high performance computing (HPC) either through access to external HPC resources or through creating internal Grids based on existing company computing resources. The access to HPC enables significant acceleration of business tasks that require high computing power. Such tasks are mainly simulation tasks as part of product development, design and engineering activities or other tasks as treatment or risk calculation in health and financial organizations respectively.