Ending the Grid Lock

 
Feb 20, 2005
by Judith Dinowitz

Recently, a group of big name IT companies (including IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel) formed a consortium to promote the use of grid computing in the business world. Grid computing, as defined by the Grid Computing Info Center (http://www.gridcomputing.com/) is the use of computational grids to share, select and aggregate "a wide variety of geographicaly distributed computational resources." These resources might include supercomputers, computer clusters, storage systems, data sources, and instruments. Grid computing would then take these disparate resources and present them as one single, unified resource for solving large-scale and data-intensive applications.

The Globus Consortium, a group formed with the aim of getting more businesses onto grid computing, was launched in January. The organization has its roots in the Globus toolkit, an open source project that was released in 1997. The toolkit, based on Unix, contains a set of components that can manage security, information infrastructure, resource management, and communication across a (typically heterogeneous) grid. It allows users to tweak these components and tailor them to meet their exact needs. The toolkit was born from the work of Steve Tuecke, Ian Foster and their colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory.

Globus has emerged from a small, open-source project to a major consortium. Who knows? With the support of these big corporations, Grid Computing may get the boost it needs to be the next new big thing in tech.

For more information about this, read a great, detailed article on the MIT Technology Review:

Ending the Grid Lock (MIT Technology Review, March 2, 2005)

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