INDUSTRY

IBM unveiled grid computing software that is available to developers via its alphaWorks emerging technology Web site. IBM says its latest grid technologies “will help developers design applications that enable businesses attain more value from their IT investments by unlocking idle computing capacity, improving productivity, and transforming business processes.” IBM offered these details: The grid system takes distributed computing to the next level, giving businesses an integrated and fully utilized on demand IT infrastructure. It also addresses two of the biggest technology challenges that enterprises face today -- increasing the utilization of existing resources and reducing infrastructure complexity. IBM's grid offerings ultimately allow businesses to connect underutilized assets, harness their collective power and manage them like a single, large computer. "IBM alphaWorks gives developers an edge by providing them with emerging technologies for creating more productive on demand applications," said, Marc Goubert, senior manager, IBM alphaWorks. "Today's announcement reinforces our continued support for grid computing across the entire company from research to development, to software and services. It also provides our business partners with a unique opportunity for creating more innovative applications that have an immediate and lasting impact." Many companies make significant investments in computing capacity, much of which sits idle 80 to 90 percent of the time. IBM alphaWorks is helping developers address this problem by equipping them with the proper tools, including ZetaGrid -- a platform that enables a business or organization to harness the free capacity of multiple computers, while ensuring the privacy of participating clients. This technology represents the first ever specification of a simple J2EE interface that enables the distribution of applications securely and reliably in a Grid environment. It also provides an efficient infrastructure for protecting grid resources. ZetaGrid was first tested by IBM's Boeblingen lab to verify a mathematical computation across 10,000 computers in a heterogeneous, dynamic environment. It is also being used to solve computational problems in computer science and life science research. Within geographically dispersed environments where data is shared across a grid infrastructure, it is often necessary to create remote read-only copies or replicas of files. Replication is used to reduce latency when accessing files and to improve the locality of data on a grid, so it can be accessed more quickly and easily. Currently managing grid replicas is a very complicated, error-prone task. IBM's Grid File Replication Manager (GFRM) builds upon the industry's open source Replica Location Service system to provide a more user -friendly, Web-based tool for managing grid replicas. The emergence of computationally-intensive grid applications in fields, such as bioinformatics and financial analytics is requiring the development of faster, better performing distributed/parallel applications. IBM's Distributed Parallel Programming Environment for Java (DPPEJ) provides a set of easy-to-use tools for developing these types of applications using the Java programming language. Interest in grid computing continues to grow as customers experience real-world benefits, such as faster time-to-results, better decision making and improved utilization of IT resources. IBM and its network of business partners, including resellers and distributors, consultants and integrators, and developers, all play a critical role in bringing these benefits to large enterprise and mid-market companies. IBM continues to establish key business partnerships with leading middleware ISVs to provide customers with the most robust grid solutions in the industry. IBM currently has 19 industry-specific grid offerings in the marketplace with more than 100 customers up and running on a grid infrastructure. IBM's grid technologies support the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), a set of specifications and standards that form a common framework for building Grid solutions. IBM is also committed to actively participating in the Global Grid Forum on the development of the standards, and its Grid offerings as well as its server, storage and middleware products will support OGSA.