Impact of Grid Computing on Network Operators and HW Vendors

Grid Computing is an attempt to make computing work like the power grid. When you run a job, you shouldn't know or care where it runs, so long as it gets done within your constraints (including security). However, in attempting to accomplish this, Grid researchers are presenting network access patterns and loads different from what has been typical of Internet traffic. MPI applications are looking for latency critical, bursty, small message traffic, some applications are producing data sets in the 100's of GBs and even Terabytes that need to be moved quickly and efficiently, or you might need remote control of earthquake shake tables and thus require constant jitter. Grid researchers are asking for finer grained control of the network, dynamic optical routes, allowing user apps (via middleware) to alter router configurations, etc. For some network operators, this sounds like their worst nightmare come true. For the network HW vendors, this presents challenges to say the least.