SCIENCE

ARMONK, NY -- IBM today announced that it was selected to partner with several centers in the U.K. National Grid to provide key technologies and infrastructure for the project. IBM is collaborating closely with these Grid centers to link a massive network of computers throughout the United Kingdom, leveraging IBM's expertise in scalable servers and storage, open standards, self-managing technologies, services and e-business software. Just as electricity is delivered to homes over an electrical grid, Computing Grids allow geographically distributed organizations to share applications, data and computing resources. A new model of computing, Grids are clusters of servers joined together over the Internet, using protocols provided by the Globus open source community (Globus.org) and other open technologies, including Linux. The British government, through the Office of Science and Technology, is building the National Grid for collaborative scientific research in a wide spectrum of disciplines. It will also serve as a testbed for deploying "e-utility computing" also known as "e-sourcing." - the delivery of computing resources including bandwidth, applications, storage as a utility-like service over the Internet. The U.K. National Grid Center is located in Edinburgh/Glasgow, and there will be eight regional centers located at the universities of Oxford, Newcastle, Belfast, Manchester, Cardiff, Cambridge, Southampton and Imperial College, London. IBM has already won a tender to build a sophisticated data storage facility at Oxford University, which will be the primary U.K. source of high energy physics data generated by a leading experiment at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. This is one of several major high energy physics projects that are planning to make use of the Grid, such as the new Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN, the European particle physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Also, using the National Grid, scientists at Cambridge will be able to run sophisticated high-energy physics applications on computers in Belfast. "I am delighted that IBM is collaborating with the U.K. to build the next-generation Globus-based Grid middleware, which will have implications far beyond the original scientific applications," said Tony Hey, architect of the U.K. National Grid. "IBM brings a wide range of key technologies to the Grid agenda and are collaborating closely with several of our Grid centres." "The United Kingdom is clearly taking a leadership role in the development of Grid computing, which represents a significant market opportunity," said David Turek, IBM vice president of emerging technologies. "IBM is proud to be an integral part of the National Grid project -- a bold next step in the evolution of the Internet." For additional information visit www.ibm.com