Speaker
Antonio Puliafito
(University of Messina)
Description
Business Grid promises the wide adoption of economic valuable Grid services. A lot of effort is being spent by the research community as well as by companies that are interested in its adoption. The business component involves more stringent requirements in terms of security, confidentiality, trust, guarantees etc. Moreover, by its nature a business process requires most of the times interactions with other business processes and therefore the Business Grid has to provide service composition. Also, regulations of B2B and B2C interactions have to be performed through SLAs which need a management system that deals with those contracts.
Researchers are now focusing on those business aspects, trying to address some of the new arising challenges namely business models, pricing models and market economies. Also, some of the current Grid middleware (Globus, GRIA, Unicore, gLite) are including some of the mentioned aspects within their solutions.
In this talk, we present the S-Sicilia project, a 2-year collaboration between Oracle and the COMETA consortium, aiming to setup a Grid-based business infrastructure to provide business services with guaranteed QoS for SME companies. The project does not pretend to address all aspects related to a Business Grid but, by solving particular requirements, be a sort of benchmark to reach a global business-based Grid adoption.
Our starting Grid infrastructure, provided by the Pi2S2 project (a project co-funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR)), is primary used for scientific applications with no QoS guarantees. We have created a business layer on top of this Grid infrastructure in order to provide business services with guaranteed quality. Being service demand in most cases unpredictable, the ability to scale the system with it can be a winning factor for SME companies, which normally have limited budget to spend compared to large enterprises.
