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“As an early adopter of grid computing, MCNC has identified the challenges in deploying, operating, and scaling a production grid infrastructure,” said David Rizzo, chief executive officer of MCNC. “We are committed to the tenet that common standards are of utmost importance to ensure that equipment and applications from multiple vendors work together. By joining both of these organizations, MCNC will continue its work to accelerate the adoption, and delivery of the tremendous benefits, of grid computing technology for academic research and commercial customer communities.” MCNC believes that the future of grid computing is unfolding in three waves of adoption. First, as academia has led the development of the Internet, the academic research community has driven the development of the first wave of grid computing over the past five years. Today, commercial interest in grid computing is a catalyst for the second wave of adoption that is centered on, and is delivering substantial benefits to, businesses and industry. On the horizon is the third wave of adoption that will deliver benefits to consumers and is predicted to be even more pervasive and significant than the Internet is today. MCNC has now formalized its relationship with the Global Grid Forum following its active involvement in the organization’s working groups in the past five years. MCNC conducts its own research and participates in the Global Grid Forum’s working groups addressing a broad range of topics, including information security and retrieval, joint collaboration, applications, middleware and network infrastructure provisioning. “The Global Grid Forum has done a wonderful job creating the grid community and working on a multitude of grid computing issues, including the development of standards and best practices,” said Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of MCNC Grid Computing & Networking Services and the former senior director of grid computing for Sun Microsystems Inc. Gentzsch said that the Global Grid Forum drove the first wave of grid computing development and will continue to drive the evolution of grid computing in the future. “Now that vendors have created even more interest from commercial companies who want to seize the wealth of benefits that grid computing provides, the Enterprise Grid Alliance is simply following the demand of their customers to accelerate the near-term requirements for deployment of enterprise grid computing. With a keen focus on the implementation of standards in vendor products to ensure interoperability among competitors, we consider the Enterprise Grid Alliance to be complementary to the current Global Grid Forum work.” Since it was founded in 1980, MCNC has collaborated on technology research, development and deployment with customers, providers and vendors in academia, government and industry. MCNC led the creation of one of the nation’s first grid computing test beds in 2001, the North Carolina Bioinformatics Grid, and is currently developing one of the nation’s first statewide grid services networks in partnership with the University of North Carolina 16-campus system. The statewide grid will serve as a reference implementation for commercial use of grid computing within the enterprise and across organizational boundaries. As an independent organization, MCNC knows from experience that customers demand heterogeneous grid computing solutions. MCNC has embraced an evolutionary roadmap in the development and deployment of grid computing that spans the interests of all three waves of adoption – research, commercial and consumer. With MCNC’s grid testing and evaluation facilities, and its historic commitment to deploy grid technology in both test bed and production environments, MCNC is in an ideal position to help drive standard interfaces, interoperability and deployment of grid solutions.