IBM Wins Network Initiative

IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y., won a contract to provide key technologies and support for an experimental National Grid network initiative undertaken by the United Kingdom.

Company officials declined to disclose the contract's value, but said the National Grid network is being funded through the British government's Office of Science and Technology as part of the e-Science Core Programme.

The e-Science Core program is a three-year, $72 million package to develop a global infrastructure for scientific collaboration. As a form of distributed computing, grid networking protocols allow geographically distributed organizations to share applications, data and computing processing power across the Internet.

IBM will provide expertise and hardware in servers and storage, standards, self-managing technologies, services and e-business software. The grid should be finished within the next few months.