Server platforms Toolkit

Grids set for enterprise push

Martin LaMonica CNET News.com

Published: 28 Apr 2005 18:20 BST

Two initiatives in the coming weeks will seek to make computing grids, where far-flung computers act as a single machine, more widespread in the business world.

In May, a consortium of vendors called the Enterprise Grid Alliance plans to release its first recommendations for making grids more palatable to businesses, ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com has learned.

The guidelines from the EGA, which was formed one year ago to promote grid computing in business, will address a range of technical issues, from security to a utility-like pricing system for buying computing power in industry-standard increments.

At the end of this week, a consortium of grid computing researchers and corporations called the Globus Alliance plans to release the Globus Toolkit 4.0 for writing applications that run on several, disparate machines.

The Globus tools and the EGA technical recommendations aim to address computing tasks suited to the business realm rather than academia, where computing grids have been used for years. Perhaps more significantly, these efforts seek to establish industrywide grid standards, something experts say is still lacking.

"The challenge is getting the ideas out of the lab and into commercial use," said Steve Tuecke, CEO of Univa, which Tuecke founded with a group of grid computing luminaries in December last year to build commercial systems around the Globus Toolkit. "Being used just in science isn't going to cut it."

The grid computing industry today is roughly at the same stage the Internet was about 10 years ago, experts say. Before commercial customers can share their computing resources more effectively across widespread networks, they need a wide variety of standardised products.

Today, most examples of grid computing are done using vendor-specific tools within a single company, said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata.

"We're in the stage of development where you build a grid, you don't buy it, because these are all tools," Eunice said. "It's commercially viable, but you still have to put a lot of things together."

The exact definition of computing grids is hazy, though people typically use the term to describe a network where many individual computers coordinate their work, like a well-organised ant colony.

Today, most people associate grid computing with futuristic scenarios, such as the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, which is tapping unused desktop PC processing to search for extraterrestrial life.

But some organisations are pushing to make the grid appropriate for much more mundane matters, such as crunching corporate data.

The Globus Toolkit 4, for example, is designed to make it easier to build an application that taps into computing resources — such as servers, storage and databases — that are spread out across a network. The open source Globus software uses a number of existing specifications, notably Web services.