BEinGRID

BEinGRID (Business Experiments in Grid) was a research project partly funded by the European Commission as an Integrated Project under the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) sponsorship program. The project started on 1 June 2006, ran 42 months until December 2009, and was coordinated by Atos Origin.
According to the project factsheet, their mission is "to establish effective routes to foster the adoption of Grid Computing across the EU and to stimulate research into innovative business models using Grid technologies." Results of the project are available from IT-Tude.com.
Vis-à-vis other FP6 research programs, it is significant not only for its long duration, but also for its budget, which at 24.8 million Euros, was the largest of any FP6 integrated project. Of this, 15.7 million was provided by the European commission and the remainder by its 95 contributing partner companies.
Overview
BEinGRID set out to provide the infrastructure to support pilot implementations of Grid technologies in actual business scenarios. These pilot cases included scenarios in sectors such as computational fluid dynamics, architectural rendering, ship building and video gaming. The business case for Grid technologies in these pilots also varies: in some cases it provides cost reduction, in others enhanced processing power, and in others still it enables new business models to be employed: such as running applications as Software as a service, SaaS, with variable number of computing nodes.
To extract best practice and common themes from the experimental implementations, two groups of consultants analysed the pilots, one technical, one business. The results of these cross analyses are provided by the website Gridipedia. Eighteen business experiments were carried in the initial stage of the project. A second wave of seven experiements was initiated on the 17 March 2008.
Outcome
The outcome of the project are a series of success stories from the take-up of Grid solutions by the businesses represented in the project. In addition, the project was the birthplace of the Gridipedia website. Dubbed the European Grid marketplace, it serves as a reference point to the Grid computing communituy, with its collection of reports and best practices, a glossary of distributed computing terminology, a description of Grid middleware platforms and downloads of components developed by the European Grid computing research scene. With this the project expects to stimulate the long-term take-up of Grid solutions by European business.
The consortium of 95 partners, led by Atos Origin, was drawn from across the European Union and represents the leading Grid research organisations committed to its business use and a broad spectrum of companies keen to assess the benefits to their productivity, competitiveness and profitability from their use of Grid solutions. The partnership in the business experiment pilots cuts across the full value chain of the targeted economic sector; from technology providers to different level users
The BEinGRID project showcased its initial results at the Industry Days event in Barcelona, Spain in June 2008. This event was collocated with the Open Grid Forum's OGF23 event and attracted over 500 attendees. The 3 days of the event covered stories from the project including the IT-Tude portal and the use of Grid technology in computational fluid dynamics.
In March 2009, BEinGRID launched the Grid Voices blog through the Gridipedia website.

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