Information Technology Reference
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necessary business alliances within supply chains or other inter-company collabora-
tion efforts in a safe and trustable way.
However, the Business Experiments also revealed the organizational challenges
and obstacles for companies that want to apply Grid or Cloud computing on a large
scale. Grid and Cloud computing imply major changes in the way how information
technology is used and governed in companies.
This chapter provides another analytical view on the Business Experiments and
summarizes the findings with regards to organizational and governance challenges
of Grid and Cloud computing in organizations. These aspects are considered sepa-
rately for the case of application of Grid as utility and high performance computing
and for the case of using Grid computing to support virtual organizations.
The chapter is structured as follows: section 13.2 summarizes the organizational
challenges related to utility and high performance computing, while section 13.3
summarizes the findings related to resource sharing within virtual organizations.
Section 13.4 concludes the chapter with a summary.
13.2 Organizational Challenges Related to Application of Utility and
High Performance Computing
The BEinGRID project involved 15 Business Experiments that illustrated the appli-
cation of Grid computing for enabling efficient support for tasks requiring high
computing power. Two of these Business Experiments were presented in detail in
the previous chapters:
• The BEinEIMRT Business Experiment (see chapter 9) illustrated the potential
of applying external HPC resources for calculation of radiotherapy cancer treat-
ment planning in hospitals based on the Monte Carlo methodology. The starting
point for the Business Experiment was an existing application for radiotherapy
calculation that was Grid-enabled in the Business Experiment. The application
was enhanced in the Business Experiment so that it can utilize external HPC
resources and it can be offered either in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) mode
or it can be deployed on internal computing clusters. The deployment of the
Grid-enabled radiotherapy planning application resulted in a decrease of the
time-to-solution to a level that can be acceptable for daily work at the hospital.
For example, the execution time of a treatment verification was reduced from
193 hours to only 4, this means, from more than one week to an acceptable time
for a day of work.
• The Ship Building Business Experiment (see chapter 10) illustrated the use of
external computing resources for collaborative ship simulation and engineering
based on the SaaS paradigm. Similar to the BEinEIMRT Business Experiment
described above, the starting point for the Business Experiment was an existing
application for Ship Design and Integration System (SESIS) that was Grid-
enabled in the Business Experiment. One of the participants in the Business
Experiment provided the external utility computing resources. The new Grid-
enabled collaborative simulation solution was tested for simulating the impact
