Grid use growing; users cite software licensing issues

Computerworld - PHILADELPHIA -- Although the adoption of grid computing is growing in enterprises, users may face obstacles finding software that can be easily licensed to run on a grid.
In many cases, software license models are ill adapted to run in grid environments that can quickly scale up or down depending on demand, say users. If a software license is based on CPU usage, for example, costs can quickly escalate as more processors are called into service.
Software vendors "cannot license their software around a true on-demand compute model," said Chris Bennett, group leader at Acxiom Corp. The Little Rock, Ark.-based data integration company is using grid computing to manage resources across 4,000 mostly commodity-based servers and to gain processing speed. Acxiom processes some 45 billion records a month.
"Can we get out from under software vendors' powers? Can we make a truly scalable infrastructure where we are not at the whim of a software vendor?" Bennett asked at the Grid Today 2004 conference held here this week.
Bennett said that most of the software Acxiom is using on the grid includes either applications the company has built itself or open-source software. The company has about 300 software developers.
While grid computing is gradually expanding into the broader enterprise, it's still mostly used for technical, compute-intensive applications, attendees at the conference said. And since niche vendors often write applications for these systems, licensing issues often arise.
"Because the vendors that we work with are small, it's very difficult to convince them that they should change their licensing practices," said Jeffrey Mathers, director of the research and innovation group at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development LLC in Raritan, N.J.
But John Hurley, the director of grid evaluation and implementation at The Boeing Co. in Chicago, said he believes vendors are starting to address licensing issues. Grid "is new for them also," he said.
"One of the biggest problems of the grid is accounting," said Hurley. "How do you pay for things? How do you set charges?"

Users say grid computing is worth whatever licensing problems companies may face. Mathers noted that when Johnson & Johnson was studying molecules used in drug development in computer simulations on a 32-way server, the processing time took about three months. After moving those simulations to a grid that uses several hundred computing resources, processing time was cut to about two weeks.
Grid computing appears to be heading toward wider enterprise adoption. Steve Yatko, IT head of global R&D at Credit Suisse First Boston LLC