IBM Gears Up Grid Networking for Marketplace

IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y., raised eyebrows in the technology community Aug. 2 by winning a contract to help build the United Kingdom-funded National Grid network. While many may assume grid computing is still in the experimental stage, IBM is, at least tentatively, moving the technology towards the commercial marketplace.

"Grid computing has possibilities that go far beyond use in the academic community. It has tremendous potential in the realm of services," David Turek, IBM vice president of emerging technologies, told Washington Technology. "It especially has attracted a lot of interest by large companies that can use it to connect geographically diverse offices and unify the supply chain."

And the possibilities for the systems integration market are quite robust, Turek said.

IBM's Global Services organization already offers the expertise and hardware needed to build, run and maintain grids, Turek said. Scalable supercomputing systems and middleware with self-management technologies, such as the ones used in the U.K. initiative, are now offered. Further optimizations to IBM equipment are under way.

Grid networking allows geographically distributed organizations to share applications, data and computing processing power. Using open standard grid protocols, a computer can borrow resources for processing projects beyond its own capability and participate in collaborative sharing of data across broadband connections.

Grid clusters can also aggregate information into single "virtual databases," Turek said.

A pharmaceutical company or a health agency could use a computer grid to build a single virtual database containing a map of the human genome, using information that might otherwise be scattered across multiple sites in different formats, Turek said.

The grid networking protocols were developed by the Globus Project, a collective effort by the U.S. Department of Energy, the University of Southern California and independent open-source developers. The project has developed a tool kit, a collection of services and libraries addressing the security, portability, resource management, fault detection and data management issues in sharing computer resources.

The U.K. National Grid network is being funded through the British government's Office of Science and Technology as part of the e-Science Core Programme, a three-year, $72 million package to develop a global infrastructure for scientific collaboration to be spread out among eight U.K. universities. The grid should be finished within the next few months, Turek said.

Beyond the U.K. project, grid computing seems to be gaining popularity with research agencies interested in remote collaboration and processing huge amounts of data. The Global Grid Forum Web site has listed five other grid projects in various stages of development, including:


*European DataGrid: An approximately $8.6 million initiative lead by the European Organization for Nuclear Research to share intensive computation and analysis of large-scale databases among European research agencies.

*Grid Physics Network (Griphyn): A $11.9 million effort to create a petabyte-scale computational environment for large-scale physics research funded by the National Science Foundation.

*The Particle Physics Data Grid: A Department of Energy funded collaboration among nine U.S. university physics research labs.


IBM Research has built its own grid to connect its research and development labs in the United States, Israel, Switzerland and Japan.

Other companies offering grid management software and solutions include Sun Microsystems Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., Entropia Inc. of San Diego and Avaki Corp. of Cambridge, Mass.