Hi, I agree that "production" can be interpreted in many ways, and it may well be that the name of this group is misleading. Let's check what Webster has to say of "production" as an attributive: "something not specially designed or customized and usually mass-produced <a production car> <production housing>" Note "usually mass-produced". In my understanding, "production grid" is like a "production car" - like your average Renault is a production car as opposed to an F1 racing bolid by Ferrari. F1 bolid performs much better, but not when it comes to packing skis and dogs and kids. F1 bolids have to meet very tight standards, and a Megane is a pretty standard car, too - but the standards are different. It's much easier to buy a set of wheels or a mirror for a production car, because they usually are interchangeable. Uh, sorry for going that far with the analogy, I hope you all got my point. Cheers, Oxana
David Wallom wrote: [...]
Maybe we could use publication impact of the work done as a measure instead, it would be as arbitrary as 'real work'?
I do not think that the publication impact is a good metric. A research/academic infrastructure used only, e.g., for testing and developing new programming models and/or technologies related to grid computing will surely have a large publication impact, as it will be used to try out new paradigms which will be subject to many publications. But not for this reason I would qualify such infrastructure as "production".
I was trying to look for the definition of "production system" in some dictionary, but so far I failed to locate anything useful...
Moreno.