What is THE GRID?
It is tempting to start searching for a definition of the what the grid is. There is no definition, the grid is a concept. The grid is about sharing the capabilities of computing devices to solve some problem or achieve some task. It is probably necessary that this task or problem could not be handled with ‘conventional’ means of computing. You could see a GRID as a super computer. And that is exactly where the first applications are being constructed.

Building a GRID
The Large Hadron Collider is a giant scientific instrument to research the fundamental particles. This instrument basically recreates conditions just after the Big Bang. When operations start thousands of researchers anxiously waiting to get their hands on the roughly 15 petabytes of data annually (100,000 DVD’s per year.) For this the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) is being created. LCG is comprised of one central storage facility, several tier-1 datacenters and thousands of tier-2 nodes (end user devices.) The best illustration of the enormous size and immense complexity of this infrastructure can be seen in strategic planning. The market trend replaces desktop with laptops. Laptops are not ‘always on’. The significance of this trend is in capacity planning. It also shows that there is no central control. (The LCG is budgeted to be roughly € 120 million. Much of the effort in GRID computing will be open source. This project can be seen as the father of large, organized grid computing.)

A health care GRID
LCG is primarily designed for computing and storage. The edges of this grid contribute to the total capacity. A different grid can be envisioned for health care. Healthcare is a national industry. Ageing populations, fragmentation of care delivery and the emergence of healthcare as an IT platform are serious challenges for society and the industry itself. Every practitioner could be ‘on the grid’ with access to medical records and diagnosis programs. Citizens (patients) can be connected to this grid, for uploading of biomedical data collected by phone or other mobile device. A healthcare grid would mean there would be two additional functional levels. We have the global/national level of trending and forecasting, ‘the health’ of the population. And individual, continuous monitoring and updating your medical record. But combined a diagnosis might be easier and more accurate.

Traffic management GRID
If (or perhaps when) TomTom will equip all its devices with communications capabilities a new sort of grid arises. This grid is highly centralized. The nodes are individual computing devices but act as sensors as well. If this grid is operational instant traffic patterns can be used to reroute customers via less busy roads. This is a grid, but very localized. But a grid like this can be opened up. A grid like this could be equiped with life satellite information and instant traffic information from existing infrastructure. Everyone potentially benefits from a grid like this.

THE GRID
The grid is not emerging as something analogous to the power grid. There is no emerging trend for computing capacity offered per cycle. There are storage (and search) solutions (where Napster or BitTorrent is very ‘grid’) and applications (MySpace for example, but not very grid), but there is no trend towards simple terminals in the home connecting to some central supercomputer doing the rest. The grids that are emerging are special purpose, or at least dedicated-area-solutions. A grid is infrastructural, and as such not very visible. It is not ‘the next web’, because the existence is largely invisible and the benefits will be taken for magic.

GRID thinking
One of the most striking examples of the consequence of grid thinking is the introduction of peer2peer in power grids. When consumers become producers a grid in the ‘computing’ sense has been born. It is about pooling of resources for a general purpose. If other industries (and perhaps companies) see the benefit (new products, savings) in the case of healthcare of a TomTom application they will want to pool their resources with their competitors, partners and customers. The paradigm will change from either/or to and/and. It will be about cooperation, not about competition. The grid is about inclusion (sharing) not exclusion. And the grid is about effectiveness (purpose), not about efficiency.