From international grid to national gridS?

During the opening session of the Healthgrid, both Vincent Breton and Kyriakos Baxevanidis focused on the future of international Grid infrastructures. The end of the EGEE project hastened the creation of EGI and NGIs for each country of the EU.

It is clear that Healthgrids are now facing multiple mutations, from architecture to services. Moreover, the rise of clouds causes a real existential issue to grids which have to consider new options.

The major anxiety concerns the risk of dislocation of the international grids in favor of a multitude of national grids. That's why the needs of structuration, standard definition (and adoption) and usage of common low level services has never been so prominent, future of grids mostly depends on a good coherence in technologies and services used.

In the Life Science Workshop on Monday afternoon, different national communities presented their point of view. Most of presentations highlighted the role of an international regulation authority to preserve grid consistency but national communities received with enthusiasm the new responsibilities in their national grid infrastructure. Is it really encouraging? Time will tell.

The need of computational power and data management has never been so high within the scientific communities and grids are still promised a great future. But both EGI and NGIs communities have to respond quickly to the new challenges they are now facing. The future of the international-wide public grid is in their hands.