Garbled Grid Hype

There has been some rather confused coverage in the press about the grid infrastructure that supports the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Times has an article that cast the grid as a "superfast internet", with the emphasis on the high-bandwidth links that have been laid to support the LHC data dispersal. It also talks about the numbers of servers connected to the LHC grid, but without clarifying the distinction between bandwidth and processing power. It also implies that the LHC grid is the only grid, which perhaps we can forgive the journalists for, as plenty of technical people still refer to "the grid" as if there were only one.

A Yahoo article, taken from Sky News, goes rather further, claiming that "the internet, as we know it, could be obsolete within a decade". The phrase, "as we know it", lends a wonderful vagueness to the claim. The article goes on to say that the Grid was the brainchild of CERN, which of course is an exaggeration. On the technical side, this article is possibly better, describing the LHC grid as a linked network of computers and describing some of the applications that it has been used for. There's just one paragraph where the illustration of bandwidth has been taken rather literally and expounded as if every household will have such connectivity, which is a separate issue.

I'm sure that none of the inaccuracies are the fault of the people mentioned in the articles. Journalists need to tell a story snappily and with an "angle" that will interest their audience. But the grid community need to do a better job of telling people what grids are about. We are doing our bit by producing some new material for Grid Computing Now!, which should be on the web site shortly.

Comments

Webinar: Powering your business with Cloud Computing

On October 14th, I will be hosting a Grid Computing Now! web seminar on the topic of Cloud Computing. We have lined up two very interesting speakers who are using Cloud now to make businesses work. Ross Cooney had a good technological solution to sell but couldn't make it economic until Cloud Computing allowed him to pay for his computation only when he needed it. He will discuss the instant benefits and long term impact of cloud computing to the development, competitiveness and scalability of your application. Alan Williamson created the BlueDragon Java CFML runtime engine that powers MySpace.com. He advises several businesses and will give an overview of the different types of services available and how to avoid being locked-in to a single supplier. You can register for this event here .

Business Model Canvas

A Business Model Canvas is a tool for mapping the core functions and capabilities of an organisation. Compared to the Core Diagrams that I described in an earlier post , the business model canvas attempts to present more aspects of the business, starting with the value proposition – a statement of what the organisation offers to its users (in the business world, to its customers). It shows the activities and resources, as Core Diagrams do, but also shows user relationships & channels, and also benefits and costs. I’m not aware of any universities that have used this tool but you can find examples from elsewhere on the web. We are considering business model canvases as a tool for mapping the strategic capabilities of units at the University of Edinburgh. Phil Taylor, our EA contractor, sketched an outline of what a business model canvas might begin to look like for HR: This is only intended to be suggestive: the real canvas would need to result from in-de...

Changing Principles

In EA, architecture principles set a framework for making architectural decisions. They help to establish a common understanding across different groups of stakeholders, and provide guidance for portfolios and projects. Michael Durso of the LSE gave a good introduction to the idea in a webinar last week for the UCISA EA community. Many organisations take the TOGAF architecture principles as a starting point. These are based on the four architectural domains of TOGAF: business, information/data, applications, technology/infrastructure. These principles tend to describe what should be done, e.g. re-use applications, buy in software rather than build it, keep data secure. See for example the principles adopted at Plymouth University and the University of Birmingham . Recently though, I encountered a different way of looking at principles. The user experience design community tend to focus more on how we should do things. E.g. we should...

Distributed Thinking

Search This Blog