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Gray (2003) comes to the conclusion that Grid applications must be really compute-
intensive, or will otherwise not be economical.
Compared to that, the question of most cost-effective investment in cases similar
to the Ship Building BE example might be different. The Ship Building BE demon-
strated the benefits of Grid computing on the example of one of many simulation
tasks during the design of a ship. The volume of compute-intensive tasks required
for the complete virtual design and build of a ship is much higher. Thus, a more
favourable solution might be an investment in bundling own available resources into
an internal Grid infrastructure. For example, Opitz et al. (2008) show that a solution
based on cycle stealing from existing resources has the potential for considerable
costs savings.
The examples above illustrate that for a sound HPC Grid computing invest-
ment decision, several options need to be compared: sourcing from external utility
computing and SaaS providers, transforming the existing internally available infra-
structure into a Grid infrastructure and investing in a specially dedicated internal
Grid computing infrastructure.
13.3 Organizational Challenges Related to Application of Grid
Computing for Virtual Organization Support
Support for building virtual organizations (VOs) is the second application area of
Grid computing in companies illustrated by Business Experiments. The main goal
of Grid-based VOs is to enable resource and data sharing as well as coordinated
problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional collaborations (see also Foster et al.
2008) among several cooperating companies. Two Business Experiments illustrated
the application of Grid-based VOs in companies in this topic:
• The AgroGrid Business Experiment (see chapter 11) provided a Grid-based
solution for supporting collaboration among companies within supply chains
in the agricultural industry. The presented solution provides a Grid-enabled
market place that allows companies operating in agriculture food markets to
offer and source capacities, to negotiate quality of food to be delivered, to estab-
lish contracts, to track and trace contract execution and to create dynamic supply
chain-related VOs.
• The VHE Business Experiment (see chapter 12) was dedicated to the devel-
opment of a generic Grid-based and service-oriented virtual hosting environ-
ment (VHE), where business services can be integrated with one another across
organizational boundaries and domains. The environment supports service-based
cross-enterprise interaction by leveraging the services available at the different
organizations. It allows for an easy and flexible exposure and offering of serv-
ices and usage within supply chains. The solution enables a management and
governance model that spans across resource layers and organizational bounda-
ries in order to achieve a correct picture of the infrastructure, its state and the
services exposed. It provides the means to audit policies and sub-systems and
is able to prove the compliance of the solution with local regulation, corporate
