When the GridEcon project was launched in July 2006, the idea of Grid computing was mainly
restricted to voluntary sharing of computing resources (e.g. supercomputing resources or
distributed servers). The idea of commercial computing-on-demand was a vague vision that just
started to show up in ICT business with Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” (EC2) service,
which became operational in its beta version on August 25th
, 2006.
Throughout the duration of the GridEcon project, the commercial usage of Grid computing in the
Grid world outside GridEcon has evolved substantially. Not only has the EC2 service become a
cornerstone of commercial computing resource trading since fall 2008; there are also many other
companies that provide Cloud services, such as Sun N1 Grid and IBM Blue Cloud. In other
words, the idea of commercial Grid computing has been augmented by the vision of the Cloud.
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