Grid and Cloud Computing Integration with NGN

Over the past few years, Grid computing has become an increasingly hot topic in the world of new technologies. It is gradually also becoming familiar to the mass public through scientific and industrial field trials. Grid computing has been adopted and is used by academia and industry due to its high potential for improving manageability, utilizations, and performance of geographically distributed and diverse resource centers. During 2008 and 2009 commercial interest shifted from "grids" to "clouds", with the availability of several on-demand compute and storage resources. Recently, interest has been growing to integrate grid and cloud computing with the Next Generation Network (NGN) in the telecommunication domain. Telecom operators are bound to become key players in a grid and cloud computing value chain as they provide connectivity and own computing resources. Moreover they have established customer relationships and accounting/billing experience, essential for business/commercial grids and clouds. Defining the best ways to integrate existing as well as future telecommunication equipment and network infrastructure with grids and clouds assumes the availability of interoperable Grid solutions built by IT in conjunction with the Telecom industry. This paper describes the approach taken by ETSI Technical Committee for Grid computing (TC GRID) and STF 331 (ICT GRID Technologies Interoperability and Standardization) to support the integration of grid and cloud computing with the NGN architecture.