IBM Wins U.K. Deal for Experimental Grid Network

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, the company announced Aug. 2.


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 brings a wide range of key technologies to the grid agenda and are collaborating closely with several of our grid centers," said Tony Hey, architect of the National Grid.


The UK National Grid Center is located in Edinburgh/Glasgow, and will have regional centers at the universities of Oxford, Newcastle, Belfast, Manchester, Cardiff, Cambridge and Southampton, as well as at the Imperial College of London.


IBM, which is doing its own grid computing initiative to bring the concept into the mainstream, 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, according to David Turek, IBM vice president of emerging technologies.


"The United Kingdom is clearly taking a leadership role in the development of grid computing, which represents a significant market opportunity," said Turek. He said the National Grid project is "a bold next step in the evolution of the Internet."