Perspectives on Grid Computing

Grid computing has been subject of many large national and international IT projects in the past. However, not all goals of these projects have been achieved. Particularly, the number of users are lagging behind the forecast of many grid projects. This underachievement may have caused the claim that the grid concept is on the way to be replaced by Cloud computing and various X-as-a-Service approaches. In this paper, we try to analyze the current situation and to identify promising directions for future grid development. Although there are shortcomings in current grid systems, we are convinced that the grid concept is still valid and can benefit from new developments like Cloud computing. Further, we strongly believe that some future applications need this concept and that in turn more research is required to turn this concept into reliable, efficient and easy to use implementations.