GRIDtoday editor Derrick Harris spoke with three HP executives about what the company is doing in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region, and about how that region is using Grid computing. Those interviewed were: Martin Walker, scientific research manager for HP EMEA; Paul Vickers, Grid strategist at HP Labs in Bristol, United Kingdom; and Ed Turkel, manager of the product and technology marketing group for HP HPC.

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GRIDtoday: Overall, what are your impressions of the Grid market in the EMEA region? Is the technology being used more in academic settings or in commercial settings?

MARTIN WALKER: Grid technology is being adopted by the scientific research community, and by certain vertical commercial market segments. The EC-funded EGEE project has contributed significantly to the creation of an infrastructure to support science, and this is being continued with the EGEE II project that started just over a month ago. With over 90 participating institutions, this is the largest Grid infrastructure in the world. The creation of this infrastructure was initially driven by the need to distribute and process the data to be generated by the Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN, but now supports applications from a number of other scientific disciplines, notably the life sciences. The EGEE grid uses open source middleware called gLite. There are discussions on how to make EGEE a persistent infrastructure residing on top of the European research network GEANT.

The most notable vertical commercial sectors are banking/finance and biotech/pharmaceutical. In contrast to research, these deployments use professionally supported middleware from independent software vendors.

PAUL VICKERS: We see a lot of interest in Grid and related technologies of virtualization, automation, Service-Oriented Architectures and utility services. Adoption in commercial settings is in early adopter high-performance computing segments -- commercial users of mainstream IT are slower to adopt. Usage is more prevalent in academic settings, which includes a larger proportion of HPC users and where public funding is encouraging adoption of Grid. In general, commercial users tend to use supported Grid middleware products, and academic users tend to use open source tools.

Gt: Are there certain regions countries or regions that are further along than others in terms of usage and adoption? What are the leading countries/regions and what are they doing differently?

WALKER: Consistent with globalization, the distinction in usage and adoption is not geographical, but by application and segment. Most mature are the high-energy physics community, who have a real problem that must be solved before the LCG goes online, and the pharmaceutical industry, who have realized real advantage through deployment of Grid infrastructure. Applications that benefit from Grid today can be characterized as loosely asynchronous and whose component tasks require little communication of data. These are the low-hanging fruit, and that tells you where usage and adoption is happening.

ED TURKEL: I wouldn't point to specific European countries doing more or less than others -- there are consortia and Grid projects in all over, including national and regional efforts. There are some similar efforts in both APAC and North America, but it would appear that Europe is furthest along.

Gt: How does the EMEA region compare with other leading geographies (e.g., North America and APAC)?

WALKER: Having a Europe-wide infrastructure with uniform middleware and interfaces in EGEE is a clear distinction from the diverse and incompatible approaches being taken to support science in other regions of the globe. The differences in the commercial space are much less.

Gt: How have programs like the UK e-Science Program and EGEE, etc., affecting the region -- and Europe specifically -- in terms of Grid knowledge, usage and adoption?

VICKERS: The European Commission programs, plus the national programs such as in the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, have generated a substantial base of Grid knowledge and experience of usage. Adoption of technologies such as EGEE middleware has thus far been predominantly in academia rather than commerce.

Gt: How is HP doing in EMEA? Has the company invested a lot of resources in the region, and is the investment paying off in terms of sales and customer wins?

WALKER: HP is an active participant in the Large Hadron Collider computing grid and the CERN Openlab for data Grid applications. HP has supplied equipment for several local grids that participate in EGEE. HP is a major player in grid deployments in vertical commercial market segments. HP employees are active in various Grid-related activities, such as members of external advisory committees. HP has also worked with UNESCO during the past couple of years piloting programs to encourage young scientists to remain in disadvantaged parts of Europe, notably the western Balkans, by helping create a Grid infrastructure to support participation in collaborations from their home institutions rather than seek employment elsewhere.

VICKERS: HP is a long-time collaborator with the particle physics Grid via CERN openlab and other local collaborations, and was the first commercial member of the CERN LCG computing grid.

HP EMEA collaborations/wins in the scientific sector include GRNET national grid in Greece, M-Grid in Finland, NorduGrid in Norway, SPACI in Italy, UNESCO South Eastern Europe Grid.
 
In the commercial sector, HP has several Grid customers in the financial services vertical.

Gt: Is HP doing anything interesting in the EMEA region? Is the company working on any projects of note?

VICKERS: There is a new HP Flexible Computing Services business offering utility services paid by the CPU-hour (reservation model).

Gt:  Are there any key industries, such as oil & gas in the Middle East, where Grid computing is seeing more widespread adoption?

VICKERS: Flexible Computing Services early adopters are in financial services, oil & gas and CAE. There is also strong interest from investment banks. Schlumberger is a reference user of HP FCS in EMEA.

Gt:  What do you see on the horizon for Grid and its related technologies, both in EMEA and worldwide?

VICKERS: There are no EMEA-specific requirements as such, although the high level of public funding for Grid-related research and development may influence the development of the market in EMEA.
 
We expect to see the EMEA market, and the worldwide market, continuing to adopt Grid-related technologies. The current stage of development, as exemplified by the HP Flexible Computing Services offer, is the application of these technologies by service providers delivering services across organizational boundaries -- a more challenging use case than inter-enterprise usage. The longer-term challenge is to apply and adapt these technologies to fit the requirements of mainstream transactional IT systems.