Who should attend

This event will be of particular interest to Grid IT professionals.

Benefits of attending include:

• Discover how the next generation Grid will both make money and save money;
• See practical examples of the technology in action;
• Get a perspective from both the service-provider and service-consumer sides;
• Meet senior representatives from businesses that are currently involved in leading-edge Grid developments.

Registration

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT
There is no charge to attend.

Please register no later than 25 February 2008.

The next generation Grid will emerge very soon

Defining the architecture that will lead to the emergence of the next generation Grid - one that goes beyond the academic roots of the Grid and prepares the way for the use of Grid technologies by business is at the heart of the NextGRID project. Dr Mark Parsons, the project’s Chairman, explains how the team is working hard to achieve its vision of the future…

NextGRID has a clear vision of the future, a future of grids which are economically viable, in which new and existing business models are possible; in which development, deployment and maintenance are easy; and in which the provisions for security and privacy give confidence to businesses, consumers and the public. This is a futuristic world of “Next Generation Grids” where large numbers of resource providers and consumers use well-established and stable infrastructures.

The full realisation of NextGRID’s vision of the future will take a long time and involve a much wider community of researchers, developers and users. We inspire and work with this wider community, providing critical input and thought leadership to the development of the architecture for future Grids, incorporating our results into widely accepted standards and so encompassing a much larger body of work within our own organisations and in the community at large. Parts of our work are incremental and part revolutionary.

The team shares the European Commission’s expectation that the work done by NextGRID and other projects will lead to the emergence of the Next Generation Grid by the end of this decade.

The aim of the NextGRID project is to investigate and address the many technical issues that must be resolved before future grids as described above, become a reality. Our goal when we started in 2004 was the formulation of an architecture that supports the emergence of the Next Generation Grid. As well as developing architectural components, the team have also sought to improve technology in key areas such as security, development of applications, interoperability, quality of service and robustness.

NextGRID has a strong focus on tackling the “Grid for business” agenda and is thus far the only project worldwide that has specifically focused on driving the architecture of the next generation of the Grid forward. The project has defined principles for a service-oriented infrastructure, based on Grid technologies, which is as ubiquitous and as transparent as the web is today and provides support for business applications.

NextGRID has consolidated the results of its research by producing a set of Generalised Specifications which define the NextGRID Architecture. These Generalised Specifications are a series of profiles and schemas that specify the way in which architectural components should interact. In addition, a Cookbook has been produced to assist developers who are interested in implementing NextGRID compliant systems. Full details of the Generalised Specifications and the Cookbook are available on the project website: http://www.nextgrid.org.

The NextGRID project is partly funded by industry and by the European Commission under the IST Programme. It started on September 1, 2004, has a duration of 42 months and a budget of €16 million. Industrial partners include BT, Datamat, Fujitsu, HP, Microsoft, NEC and SAP. See www.nextgrid.org for further details.