2004 Predictions of a grid Technologist on the GRID!

Previously senior director of grid computing at Sun Microsystems Inc, Wolfgang Gentzsch stated in an article on Computer world that grid computing will come in three waves. The first, well under way, primarily involves the academic research community. The second, just beginning, brings in corporations as users. The third, still some years off, will add individual consumers to the grid. At that point, the Internet will be "the grid," says Gentzsch, managing director of grid computing and networking services at MCNC Inc.
He mentioned the second wave to be commercial entities, To the question,
What's moving us into the second, corporate, wave of grid computing?
He answered "The IT vendors have their grid story in place -- IBM, Sun, Oracle and the others -- for the next generation of products that they want to ship and make money with. But there's no money in research grids, and consumer grids are far out. So the current interest is in the enterprise grid."
I think we are in the midst of the second wave with multiple offerings of grid for rent from very companies that he mentioned.
What about the third wave? For that his answer to the question;
What about the third grid wave, the one for consumers?
We are talking about gaming grids, where hundreds of gamers come together and use the grid for really heavy interactive and compute-intensive stuff.
Also health care. If you have a heart attack or stroke and you are within 15 minutes of a hospital, you get easy help. But in the countryside, the percentage of people dying from heart attacks is at least 50% higher than in the cities. Now, a grid reduces distances to zero, so the country doctor has immediate access to all these expensive machines, which have digital heartbeats, in the hospital. If that hospital is too busy, the health care grid broker selects another resource that is least loaded.
All his statements have come to be true and still changing. Read the complete article here

Tags: Grid computing, the grid, research grid, enterprise grid, gridtech