Clouds of ash

I never thought I'll be blogging from a coach in the midst of Swedish woods. Neither I ever imagined I won't be able to get from one Swedish town to another by any mean because of a volcano eruption in Iceland. The Nordic EGEE User Forum ended with a truly Nordic specialty - on Thor's Day the Norse gods decided to demonstrate their implementation of clouds. A powerful one, but really useless. I only hope this will not overcloud the Forum outcomes and will turn out being a good sign for all the newly starting projects featured in the final session. At times it seemed as if "G" in EGI should be tipp-exed into "C" to follow the suit.

Well, let's see: suppose Grids will be able to provide service so stable and reliable, customers will be prepared to pay cash. And suppose Grid user interfaces will be able to capture and virtualize any working environment, be it a Windows PC or a 1000-processes strong parallel application. Will these Grids stop being Grids and become Clouds? Or now suppose different Clouds will decide to federate their resources across administrative domains and will have to introduce ROCs and GGUSes - will they become Grids? Perhaps the next conference will show. Hope there are no volcanoes in vicinity of Amsterdam.