The BEinGRID Project 
Earth Observation Business Experiment in Grid
 
Pedro Pereira Gonçalves and Fabrice Brito
pedro.goncalves@terradue.com
Terradue Srl.

Abstract

A large number of International and European open source Grid architectures solutions
have been developed in the past years to enable the management of distributed
resources across multiple enterprises boundaries and creating collaborative
environments (Virtual Organisations) transparently. Nevertheless, the dream of global
grid computing has not caught on with most business, and the promise of delivering
boundless supercomputer power to any user and anywhere seems still far away. There is
a clear threat that industry and companies do not accept the existing middleware by
lack of knowledge or confidence in its maturity and reliability. 

Grid is now at a critical phase in its transition from research and academic use to a
widely enterprise adoption. An unawareness of the benefits brought by the use of Grid
technologies and the lack of reference business cases that persuade potential users
is leading to a weak commercial exploitation of results and to the slow deployment of
this technology into the market. It is time to establish effective routes to push
this technology adoption and to stimulate the research into innovative business models. 

The main objective of the “Business Experiments in Grid” (BEinGRID) project, which
has recently been selected for funding by the European Commission’s Grid Technologies
F2 Unit, is to foster the adoption of the so-called Next Generation Grid technologies
by the realization of several business experiments and the creation of a toolset
repository of Grid middleware upper layers. BEinGRID will undertake a series of
targeted business experiment pilots designed to implement and deploy Grid solutions
in a broad spectrum of European business sectors (entertainment, financial,
industrial, chemistry, gaming, retail, textile, etc). To minimize redevelopment of
components, BEinGRID will deploy innovative Grid solutions using existing open Grid
components from across the European Union and beyond.

In the Earth Observation domain, one of the successful applications of open source
grid technology in Europe were developed under the backing of the European Space
Agency applications, mainly with the GRID on-Demand project and with the opening of
the Earth Observation G-POD call for proposals. While the first intends to respond to
the Agency’s internal operational processing needs by using open Grid technology, the
later invites research parties to integrate their applications and processors to
share its own data and processing power in a controlled and secure GRID environment. 

Departing from that institutional experience, the BEinGRID’s Business Experiment
dedicated to Earth Observation will analyse the particular service implementation
requirements that will enable and benefit from the GRID technology adoption.
Subsequently a baseline for incoming Earth Observation and geo-spatial services shall
be established where Grid technology might reduce time-to-market and encourage their
use. Nonetheless, issues like the interoperability within different data structures
and user communities will also be addressed by this business experiment.