Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2 The BEinGRID Project
Theo Dimitrakos
2.1 Introduction
Most of the results presented in this topic were created within the BEinGRID project.
BEinGRID, Business Experiments in GRID, is the European Commission's largest
integrated project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research,
part of the European Union's sixth research Framework Programme (FP6). This
consortium of 96 partners is drawn from across the EU and represents the leading
European organizations in Grid Computing and Service Oriented Infrastructures
(SOI) and a broad spectrum of companies covering most vertical markets keen on
assessing the benefits to their productivity, competitiveness and profitability from
using Grid and Cloud Computing solutions.
The mission of BEinGRID is to generate knowledge, technological improve-
ments, business demonstrators and reference case-studies to help companies in
Europe and world-wide to establish effective routes to foster the adoption of SOI
technologies such as Grid and Cloud Computing and to stimulate research that helps
realizing innovative business models using these technologies. In terms of tech-
nology innovation BEinGRID has defined and steered the technical direction of
Business Experiments (BEs) in all vertical market sectors by offering them best-
practice guidance in each of the stages (requirements, design, prototyping, demon-
stration), thought-leadership in tackling innovative problems and technical advice
for improving the BE solution.
Teams of technology and business experts achieved this mission by eliciting
common technical requirements that solve common business problems across
vertical markets, by defining innovative generic solutions, called
common capabili-
ties
, that meet these requirements, by producing design patterns that explain how
these solutions can be implemented over commonly used commercial and exper-
imental platforms and by producing best-practice guidelines demonstrating how
these solutions can be applied in exemplar business scenarios.
2.2 The BEinGRID Matrix
To meet the project's objectives described above, BEinGRID has undertaken a
series of targeted Business Experiments (BEs) designed to implement and deploy
Grid solutions across a broad spectrum of European business sectors including the
media, financial, logistics, manufacturing, retail, and textile sectors. The consortium
conducted 25 Business Experiments that have been summarized at the BEinGRID
project Web site (http://www.beingrid.eu/) and described in the BEinGRID Booklet
(BEinGRID Booklet 2009). Each one of these 25 BEs is a showcase of a real-life
