RT, be nice to be involved..IBM Selected To Provide Key Technologies For Massive U.K. Computing and Data
Grid; New Computing Model Will Enable
Unprecedented Scientific Collaboration
Business Editors
ARMONK, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 2, 2001--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."
IBM Grid Expertise
IBM is the leading supplier of systems and services expertise to
the scientific and technical community. In addition to working with
many of the world's leading labs and research organizations in the
development of Grid projects, IBM Research used Globus technologies to
build its own Grid -- a geographically distributed supercomputer
linking IBM research and development labs in the United States,
Israel, Switzerland, Japan. IBM's Global Services organization offers
the complete range of IT skills needed to build, run and maintain
Grids.
To help customers manage complex Grids, IBM offers scalable
supercomputing systems and middleware with IBM eLiza self-management
technologies. Project eLiza, announced by IBM earlier this year, is a
company-wide program to develop systems that respond to the
requirements of their environment in order to optimize performance
across a network, improve security and survive failures.
IBM also plans to Grid-enable key IBM systems and technologies,
allowing them to be plugged into these growing worldwide networks
quickly and easily.
In the same way it played a leadership role in the commercial
adoption of Linux, IBM is working with the Globus open source
development community and the influential industry standards body,
Global Grid Forum.
Globus technologies have been developed over the last five years
in the research community, in a project led by Argonne National
Laboratory and the University of Sourthern California's Information
Sciences Institute. The Globus Toolkit and its protocols are now in
use in over 20 multi-million dollar eScience projects around the
world. Its large user community and open architecture, open source
structure and philosophy makes it a natural partner for IBM.
Grids for e-sourcing
Grids -- like Linux and the Internet itself -- are poised to grow
beyond the academic world and become an important business platform.
Grid protocols could provide a key platform for e-sourcing -- a major
initiative within IBM targeting the sale and delivery of computing
resources as a utility-like service over the Internet. IBM e-Utility
Labs in the United States are now using Grids to develop and test
e-sourcing services-- and IBM is already working with a number of
forward-thinking customers to enable e-sourcing in commercial grid
environments.
Grid protocols could allow companies to work more closely and more
efficiently with colleagues, partners and suppliers through:
-- Resource aggregation -- allowing corporate users to treat a
company's entire IT infrastructure as one computer through
more efficient management.
-- Database-sharing -- allowing companies to access remote
databases. This is particularly useful in the life sciences
community, where researchers need to work with large volumes
of biological data from a variety of sources. Engineering and
financial firms also could benefit significantly.
-- Collaboration -- allowing widely dispersed organizations to
work together on a project -- sharing everything from
engineering blueprints to software applications.
About the National Grid
The National Grid will be created as part of the e-Science Core
Programme, which is overseen by the British Government's Office of
Science and Technology. The e-Science Core Programme was announced
last year as part of a British government three-year funding package
to develop e-Science -- global scientific collaboration and the next
generation of infrastructure that will enable it.
IBM is a registered trademark of the International Business
Machines Corporation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus
Torvalds. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks
or service marks of others.
--30--mw/ny*
CONTACT: IBM Corp.
John Buscemi, 914/766-4495
jbuscemi@us.ibm.com |
