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The Peer-to-Peer (p2p) and Grid infrastructure communities are
tackling an overlapping set of problems. In addressing these problems,
p2p solutions are usually motivated by elegance or research interest.
Grid researchers, under pressure from thousands of scientists with
real file sharing and computational needs, are pooling their solutions
from a wide range of sources in an attempt to meet user demand.
Driven by this need to solve large scientific problems quickly, the
Grid is being constructed with the tools at hand: FTP or RPC for
data transfer, centralization for scheduling and authentication,
and an assumption of correct, obediant nodes. If history is any
guide, the World Wide Web depicts viscerally that systems that
address user needs can have enormous staying power and affect future
research. The Grid infrastructure is a great customer waiting for
future p2p products. By no means should we make them our only
customers, but we should at least put them on the list. If p2p
research does not at least address the Grid, it may eventually be
sidelined by defacto distributed algorithms that are less elegant
but were used to solve Grid problems. In essense, well have been
scooped, again.
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