IBM Wins Grid Computing Deal

Aug 02 2001

SAN FRANCISCO, - International Busines Machines, the world's biggest computer maker and compute services provider, on Thursday said it was selected to hel build out the United Kingdom's computer grid, a cluster o servers linked together over the Internet, as well as a gri connecting five Dutch universities.

The notion of a computational grid is gaining steam particularly in academic communities, and companies such as IBM and others are seeking to encourage its development i the arena of big business. The idea is to link computers, fro dozens of servers to potentially millions, to make processin power available on demand, rather like water or electricity.

"Now it's possible to start moving to the next stage, an that's being able to share computing capacity, storage capacit and applications over the Internet," said Irvin Wladawsky-Berger, an IBM veteran who is heading up the effort.

"Instead of just accessing one server and then if you nee applications on another server you have to explicitly go to i and so on, you are accessing you applications on this virtua computer that includes your server and all the other server that are part of the group," he said.

Already, elements of distributed computing, or peer-to-pee computing, or renting software over the Internet as a service are coming to fruition. No. 1 software company Microsoft, for example, is engaged in an ambitious plan calle Microsoft.NET that will re-engineer its software application to be delivered via the Internet.

"The grid, in my view, conceivably could be as significan as the World Wide Web," said Tony Hey, director of the U e-science program.

Specifically, Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM will build a high-en data storage facility at Oxford University, one of nine Gri centers. The national Grid center is in Edinburgh and othe regional centers are at the universities of Newcastle, Belfast Manchester, Cardiff, Cambridge, Southampton and Imperia College, London.

The IBM data storage facility will be the primary source o high-energy physics data generated at the U.S. Particle Physic Laboratory in Chicago and then transferred to the Unite Kingdom.

It gave no financial details.

IBM also is looking at the U.K. grid as a petri dish fo e-sourcing, IBM's term for what others such as Microsoft i building and smaller start-ups such as Salesforce.com Inc. ar already doing: selling its software as a service on subscriber basis via the Internet and delivered over the Web.

"This may or may not work, but I think it's got a fightin chance, provided it gets hardened links into the busines world," Hay said of large corporations and business at larg adopting and building out computational grids.