Biz2Grid: Moving Business to the Grid – An Application for the Automotive Industry

Keywords: Grid Computing, Market-based Scheduling, Billing & Pricing, Virtualization, Dynamic Provisioning, Automotive Industry

Biz2Grid aims at migrating industrial business applications to existing Grid-middleware systems. Therefore, it is necessary to design the organizational structure and an economically reasonable billing & pricing for Grid resources in combination with technically implementation in commercial example settings.

At the associate partner BMW Group, two applications are searched which can be exemplarily for commercial scenarios in using Grids. Besides the pure technical implementation it should be determined how the existing IT structures in planning, procurement and maintenance can dynamically be affected by market mechanisms while holding up a stable control and business environment.

On the one hand, Biz2Grid contributes to commercial use of Grid applications. On the other hand, project resultant services (e.g. billing & pricing) can be used for the D-Grid network as well as for developing commercial products with proprietary components.

From a scientific point-of-view, business-models have to be developed that are adequate for an application in the Grid. In addition, Biz2Grid addresses technical research questions. Currently, the seamless adaption of applications to Grid technologies is hardly realizable. As a consequence, it is a challenge of the project

• to distribute and parallelize real world applications and
  
• to conceptualize and implement economic business models at the same time. 

The main areas of research of our group in this project are:

• Seamless integration of a dezentralized scheduling framework (Omnivore) into the GridWay meta-scheduler to allow the integration of desktop resources
• Extension of Sun Grid Engine to support Xen-driven Virtualization of Windows machines (Xen Grid Engine)
  

The projects' duration amounts to 36 months from July 2007 until June 2010.

Biz2Grid's project consortium comprises five partners from academia and industry:

• IBM
• Universität Karlsruhe (TH)
• Universität Marburg
• Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe (FZI)
• BMW Group

Funding: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, D-Grid Inititiative

Contact: Niels Fallenbeck, Ernst Juhnke, Roland Schwarzkopf, Tim Dörnemann, Kay Dörnemann