SYSTEMS

By Steve Fisher, Editor -- On Tuesday SGI and Platform Computing announced a global alliance in which SGI will work with Platform to deploy Platform grid computing solutions, including Platform Globus, with SGI grid solutions, including the SGI Origin & Onyx series servers. To learn more, Supercomputing Online interviewed Walter Stewart, Coordinator Global Grid Strategy, SGI. SCO: Please describe the agreement in technical terms and what the two companies hope to accomplish. How are you going to leverage the strengths of both companies? What are one or two of the major challenges in such an undertaking? STEWART: Both SGI and Platform believe that Grids are built not bought. This agreement enables the two companies to work seamlessly for the customers in the creation of robust grid structures that enable the customers core activities. Both companies come armed with a suite of products including grid tools, highly scaleable computational and visualization hardware, as well as hardware and software for the management of complex data in distributed environments. The two companies will work to meet customer requirements drawing from that wide suite of products as appropriate and merging the professional services expertise of each organizations. SGI and Platform will install together fully reliable, robust grid environments with diverse resources in distributed locations that enable our customers to do their work without having to become computer geeks to do so. The challenges of such undertakings are the challenges of the Grid: seamless access to diverse resources regardless of their location; effective, secure management of data; and the ability to access both resources and data without advanced technical skills in computation. In short, computational infrastructure for 21st century research and practice in the most advanced disciplines and practice. SGI and Platform recognize that each company has unique offerings to that very high end, networked, computational infrastructure. The combination of products and services from the two companies makes high-end functionality on the Grid a reality. SCO: What is the overall significance of the agreement between SGI and Platform? STEWART: The agreement between SGI and Platform positions the two companies to better serve customers in the creation and enhancement of Grids. With Platforms suite of Grid tools and SGI’s high performance computational, visualization, and data management products together with the professional services teams of both companies, we are equipped to offer customers the widest range of options and robust functionalities in grid environments. SCO: How specifically will the agreement benefit customers? The burgeoning grid computing community? STEWART: Customers with a need for robust functionality on the Grid will benefit from a single point of contact for the two companies in the creation of their grid environments. This agreement will particularly benefit those customers who wish to use grid environments to provide diverse computational, visualization, and data management resources to large communities of users. SGI and Platform working together will build grids for customers that focus on the provision of reliable service to creative and technical customers in the sciences, government, and engineering. The projects SGI and Platform work together on will be focused on the provision of computation for furthering the research and practice within diverse disciplines in contrast with those grid projects which exist to research the computational science of the Grid. SCO: Grid Computing...is it truly computing’s future? Will I need to eventually change the name of my site to gridcomputingonline? STEWART: Grid computing is the convergence of high end computing and bandwidth. SGI and Platform have each been involved with customers for some years who have been deploying networked computing. The increasing ubiquity of bandwidth makes computation infrastructure truly possible. Hence the Grid. Grid computing is also a product of the realization that computing is at the heart of all activity with science, business, and industry in the 21st century. Computing has joined heat, light, water, electricity as a key utility for all aspects of creative, scientific, and economic endeavour. The computational needs are diverse. They are growing in their demand for robust functionality. They include much more than raw processing including visualization, the managment of data as opposed to its mere storage; and access to processing that is capable of being scaled to attack problems of extraordinary complexity with the application of multiple and diverse data sets demanding enormous communication capacity among the individual processors. High performance computing of this nature is at the root of the next break-throughs in all manner of disciplines. It is the base of what is coming to be called integrative science - how diverse systems interact and come together to create phenomena under investigation. The Grid is logical methodology to deliver this power to the multiple, highly diverse, highly distributed professionals who are leading these new break-throughs in research and practice. SCO: Where do you see “the grid” in five years? STEWART: The metaphor of the power grid remains highly effective. The Grid in five years will be no more “The Grid” than it is today. The Grid will remain a methodology for the delivery of computational power. There will be multiple grids, multiple layers to grids, multiple functionalities available on grids, multiple connexions among grids. In the way that shipping, rail roads, air transportation enabled the achievements of the industrial age. The Grid will enable the achievements and productivity increases of the knowledge age. The Grid will become a global neural network enabling the development of true connected intelligence to apply to the research challenges of the future. SGI and Platform are committed to building that infrastructure.