Toward the Eco-Grid: A Harmoniously EVOLVED INTERCONNECTION ENVIRONMENT

Designed as a complex ecosystem, it balances the competing interests of its numerous species as its social, economic, and technological environments evolve. By Hai Zhuge and Xiaoqing Shi TheInternet, along with its myriad resources and users, constitutes a vast artificial virtual environment that benefits all of human society. But both the general public and the research community may be unaware of its developmental trend toward disorder due to the exponential growth of the numbers and types of its resources and users. By way of analogy, this trend can be explained with the help of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that if we regard the environment as a closed system with constant volume and energy, then every change to the system increases its tendency toward entropy. Web users are regularly dissatisfied with the Web’s information services [5], and IT professionals worldwide look to establish new interconnection environments through, say, the Semantic Web, the Grid, and peer-to-peer and intelligent technologies [1, 2]. But these efforts neglect the problem of how to prevent the new environment from falling into its own future disorder, especially when some factors (such as resources and users) change dramatically. The natural ecological environment is another vast and complex system that has evolved over billions of years. The health of any ecosystem depends on effective energy flow, material flow, and information flow cycles to maintain the dynamic balance of populations of species in the flow cycles by assimilating waste and being able to self-recover from damage. The harmonious characteristics of the natural ecological environment represent a new way for IT professionals to establish a future interconnection environment. An Eco-Grid is an open worldwide interconnection environmen