GOVERNMENT

TORONTO, CANADA -- IBM and the Globus Project(TM) today announced a set of new specifications that for the first time would allow businesses to share both applications and computing resources over the Internet. Their work would move Grid computing beyond scientific and technical applications to real business applications. At the Global Grid Forum in Toronto, IBM and the Globus Toolkit (TM) open source team introduced the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), a set of specifications and standards that combine the benefits of Grid Computing and Web services. Customers will be able to access and share computing resources on demand over the Internet, relying on an infrastructure that is resilient, self managing and always available. As a result, customers can integrate applications, share data and processing power with huge potential cost and efficiency savings. "This is a breakthrough that moves us to the next stage of computing," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president strategy and technology, IBM Server Group. "The Internet is evolving beyond e-mail, content and electronic commerce. It is becoming a true computing platform, combining the qualities of service of enterprise computing with the ability to share distributed resources across the Internet -- applications, data, storage, servers and everything in between." The new set of specifications builds on standards such as XML,WSDL and SOAP -- all important to Web services -- with Globus Project- developed standards for Grid Computing, which are used to locate, schedule and secure computing resources. Ian Foster and Steve Tuecke of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, and Carl Kesselman of the University of Southern California School of Engineering Information Sciences Institute, authors of the original specifications for grid computing published in "The Anatomy of a Grid," worked together with IBM Fellow Jeffrey Nick and an IBM team to incorporate standards for Web services as part of the new Open Grid Services Architecture. Their white paper, "The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed System Integration" was presented at the Global Grid Forum this week and is available at www.globus.org/ogsa. "In the true spirit of the open community, we in the Globus Project believe that by working with IBM and other academic and industry partners, we can offer the solution to a very real challenge," said Foster, associate director, mathematics and computer science division, Argonne National Laboratory. "The new Open Grid Services Architecture now makes it possible to develop and integrate applications for Grid Computing that move beyond the scientific and technical community to the world of real business," added Kesselman, director of the Center for Grid Technologies Research at the USC Information Sciences Institute. OGSA is already receiving support from several industry players including AVAKI, a provider of commercial grid software solutions; Entropia, a provider of PC-based distributed computing grid technology to the enterprise; Microsoft; and Platform Computing, a provider of distributed computing software. IBM intends to leverage OGSA as a key foundation in its Project eLiza (TM) initiative. Project eLiza is IBM's Autonomic Computing inititative to build an open, heterogeneous, self-managing server infrastructure for e-business and commercial grid implementations. "E-business has become not just the heart of information technology, but the beating heart of global business. Web services, grid computing, and virtualization are three of the most important techniques taking us to the next step of using the Internet as a business computing platform," said Jonathan Eunice, Principal Analyst and IT Advisor Illuminata, Inc. For more information, visit www.globus.org or www.ibm.com.