Porting HPC Applications to Grids and Clouds - Cloud, Grid and High Performance Computing: Emerging Applications - page 36

have to change especially the user layer, only
change it in small steps and in large time cycles.
And, start with enhancing existing service mod-
els moderately, and test suitable utility models
first as pilots. And, very important, part of your
business plan has to be an excellent training and
communications strategy.
Rule 6: Establish a governance structure.
Define clear responsibilities and dependencies for
specific tasks, duties and people during and after
the project. An advisory board should include
all stakeholders (e.g. your representatives of
your end-users as well as application and system
experts). In case of more complex projects, e.g.
consisting of an integration project and several
application or community projects, an efficient
management board should lead and steer coor-
dination and collaboration among the projects
and the working groups. The management board
(Steering Committee) should consist of leaders of
the sub-projects. Regular face-to-face meetings
are very important.
Rule 7: Money, money, money. Don't have
unrealistic expectations that Grid and/or cloud
computing will save you money from the start.
In their early stage, Grid and cloud projects need
enough funding to get over the early-adopter
phase into a mature state with a rock-solid e-
Infrastructure such that other user communities
can join easily. In research grids, for example,
we estimate this funding phase currently to be in
the order of 2-3 years, with more funding in the
beginning for the Grid infrastructure, and later
more funding for the application communities. In
larger (e.g. global) research grids, funding must
cover Teams or Centers of Excellence, for building,
managing and operating the e-Infrastructure, and
for middleware tools, application support, training,
and dissemination. Also, most of today's funding
models in research and education are often project
based and thus not ready for a utilitarian approach
where resource usage is based on a pay-as-you-
go approach. Old funding models first have to be
adjusted accordingly before a utility model can

be introduced successfully. For example, today's
existing government funding models are often
counter-productive when establishing new and
efficient forms of utilitarian services (see Rule #2).
In the long run, Grid and cloud computing will
save you money through a much more efficient,
flexible, reliable, and productive infrastructure.
Rule 8: Secure some funding for the post-
project phase. Continuity especially for
Maintenance, support, and dissemination (the
latter to attract more users) are extremely important
for the sustainability of your Grid infrastructure.
Make sure already at the beginning of your project
that additional funding will be available after the
end of the project, to guarantee service and support
and continuous improvement and adjustment of
the infrastructure.
Rule 9: Try not to grid-enable your applica-
tions in the first place . Adjusting your application
to changing hardware and software technologies
costs a lot of effort and money, and takes a lot of
your precious time. Did you 'macro-assemble',
vectorize, multitask, parallelize, or multithread
your application yourself in the past? Then, grid-
enabling such a code is relatively easy, as we have
seen in this article before. But doing this from
scratch is not what a user should do. Better to
use the money to buy (lease, rent, subscribe to)
software as a service or to hire a few experienced
consultants who grid-enable your application and/
or (even better) help you enable your Grid archi-
tecture to dynamically cope with the application
and user requirements (instead vice versa). Today,
in grids, or in Grid workflows, we are looking
more at chunks of independent jobs, (or chunks
of transactions). And we let our schedulers and
brokers decide how to distribute these chunks
onto the best-suited and least-loaded servers in
the Grid or in the cloud, or let the servers decide
themselves in an over-load situation to share the
chunks with their neighboring servers automati-
cally whenever they become available.
Rule 10: Adopt a 'human' business model.
Don't invent new business models. This usually