Sledding and the Trough of Disillusionment

By Rich Wellner

Over the holiday break I did something I haven't done in ages.  My brothers and I went sledding.  When we were kids, I remember very well graduating in excitement going from the little slope down the block, to being able to go to the big kids hill with a plastic sled and finally to being able to go by myself with a lightening fast sled with steel runners.  It was the best!

As we got older and our lives got more complicated we moved on to other things during the winter.  Sledding just didn't seem all that fun anymore, and it was a lot of work hauling that sled back up the hill every run.

Anyway, we were sitting around the kitchen one morning admiring the snow and decided to take the kids sledding.  Well, we told our wives that we were taking the kids sledding, but the kids gave up very quickly leaving the hill to us.  The hill in question is on our family farm in one of the pastures that has a dirt road going up it.  We started our slides on the hill above the road, went through the road and then we launched (as shown in the photo) as we hit the shoulder and continued down the rest of the grade.

Conditions the days we sledded were absolutely perfect.  There had been about eight inches of snow a week prior that put down a nice base.  Then things warmed up for a few days before freezing solid again.  The entire farm was transformed into three inches of hard packed snow with a thick icy crust on the top.  Finally, we got another six inches of light fluffy snow providing enough cushion to land on without slowing things down too much.  Our record slides for the day ended up being about a hundred yards long.  It was a blast.

It was a blast, however, that we wouldn't have had if we hadn't pulled ourselves out of our "trough of disillusionment".  In the 90's Gartner came up with a curve to describe the Hype cycle associated with technology adoption.

As kids we had been fascinated with the speed and independence that sledding gave us.  We thought it was the ultimate, but as we got to know it better, it couldn't keep pace with our expectations.  At least until we grew up and were willing to accept it on it's own terms.

This is the same point that grid computing is at today.  The grid community has years of history and for a while everyone and his brother was jumping on the term 'grid' without regard for whether they were really doing the things necessary to qualify as such.  As a result we had a period of inflated expectations ranging from "everything is already the grid" on one end to "we'll never achieve the grid because everyone everywhere isn't going to put all their resources online and let others use them.

Those are examples of expectations that were never advertised by those who kick-started the industry and coined the term grid.  They did, however, gain a lot of mind-share.  There has been some fallout from this.  Over the past few years, as we navigated through the trough of disillusionment, people have begun to adopt grid practices that they thought would add value to specific parts of their businesses.  In some cases they even have had to adopt new terms (e.g. 'cloud computing', 'utility computing', 'data center virtualization') because the 'G' word had become unsellable.  During this time, the concepts have begun to get widespread traction as people understand how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So, put on your snow pants and check out some stuff you haven't looked at in a few years.  Globus Toolkit is over 11 years old now.  Grid Engine is now mature and open source.  Huge projects like caBIG are using the far reaching concepts of the original conceptual tenets to try and literally cure cancer.

There are great opportunities out there to create more value for your customers and users, if you can just get past the hype.