Grid Technology for Smart Organizations

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the most relevant results that grid research achieved in the last decade, it presents the actual issues of the topic, and it outlines how current and future results from this area can contribute to smart organizations. At the first place the basic goal of the Grid is presented and its state-of-the-art, service-based realization is discussed. This global infrastructure will one day connect together diverse types of hardware and software elements, abstracting them out as intelligent autonomous agents that can discover and collaborate with each other on demand. The middle part of the chapter introduces two potential middleware technologies that service grids can be built on. They are the Web services-based open grid services architecture (OGSA) and Jini. The final part of the chapter presents the future of service grids and the important role these flexible infrastructures will probably have in the life of smart organizations.