INDUSTRY

By Steve Fisher, Editor in Chief -- Today IBM announced that it has opened the doors to the first Grid Innovation Centre of its kind in the world at its Advanced Technical Solution Centre in Montpellier, France. The goal of the centre is to provide commercial customers with the opportunity to explore the constantly evolving area of Grid computing and obtain access to a grid to run prototype grid projects. The centre will employ the latest and greatest Grid technologies, including the recently created Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), which merges the open protocols used for Grid computing with the protocols used for Web services. In addition, the centre will offer customers access to the latest Grid software from grid-focused software companies like AVAKI and Platform Computing and the latest open source Grid technologies from Globus and Unicore. "We expect that Grid computing is going to be an evolution, not a revolution, and have seen movement in this direction for the past six years," said Dr. Songnian Zhou, CTO, Platform Computing. "We anticipate that in the next one to three years, the major adopters of Grid computing will be within large-scale, multi-location commercial enterprises that want to share their resources, support internal collaboration and get better return from IT investments. By working closely with leaders like IBM at their Grid Innovation Center, we can provide comprehensive Grid computing solutions to help commercial enterprises integrate their distributed and heterogeneous IT infrastructures and improve IT efficiency, which ultimately impacts business effectiveness." In addition to prototyping grid applications, customers at the centre will be able to access demonstrations of Grid technology and workshops as well as technical briefings on Grid computing with direct access to IBM's grid experts who are there to advise on specific customer projects. Grid demonstrations will also be available remotely over the IBM Intranet so customers around the world hoping to learn more about Grid computing can do so from the comfort of their own office. In Europe and the U.S., and in fact a great many countries, grid computing is being adopted very rapidly, especially in areas like the life sciences (particularly pharmaceuticals and bioinformatics) where the ability to amass and analyze mind-boggling amounts of genomic and proteomic data efficiently can be critical to drug discovery efforts. Grid computing helps these organizations streamline researchers’ access to the latest data, and improve utilization of IT resources across computing platforms, locations, and administrative domains. Based on open standards including the OGSA, the Grid Innovation Centre is comprised of Linux clusters running the most recent IBM eServer xSeries and pSeries (also known as 'Regatta') systems, as well as IBM 'Shark' storage, IBM's DB2, Websphere and Tivoli software. These are all linked to the Internet with a combination of commercial and open source grid software. "With IBM's commitment to grid standards as signaled by its participation in the Global Grid Forum in North America and now the launch of the Grid Innovation Centre in Europe, AVAKI feels that this reflects a very strong beginning for the commercial adoption of grid technology -- particularly comprehensive grid technology as offered by AVAKI covering both compute and data grid capabilities," said Dave Fish, AVAKI president and CEO. The Grid Innovation Centre will also be linked to IBM's 'BlueGrid', a distributed supercomputer linking IBM R&D labs in countries including but not limited to the US, Israel, Switzerland, and Japan.