Oracle Stakes Grid Claim With Globus Toolkit

The database giant said Wednesday that the performance, availability and scalability it has been touting for its database are perfectly suited to grid computing, in which computational tasks are divvied up among dispersed computers and offered up as a utility. The analogy is to the electricity grid and computing on demand.

"Five years ago the World Wide Web came on ... that was presentation over the Internet. Grid computing is computation over the Internet," said Benny Souder, vice president of database development at Oracle. "In a grid, the client can't tell where the data or the computing is and doesn't care."

Rivals may say Oracle is late to the party. IBM outlined its grid initiative last year. But Oracle maintains it is well-positioned. The company hopes to parlay inexpensive standard hardware,most notably plug-in "blades" (or blade servers) running Linux, the platform of choice.

Souder said that within the next 30 days Oracle will be offering the Globus Development Kit, from grid computing research pioneer the Globus Project, as a free download from the Oracle Technical Network. Oracle worked with Globus to modify this open-source software and integrate it with the database, he said.

At Oracle World here, company executives showed off a nascent grid being used by games developer Electronic Arts to host its new SIMS game. Electronic Arts' system requirement is that it support up to 100,000 simultaneous online gamers and process 30,000 SQL statements per second. Souder said Oracle9i RAC clusters running on Linux is meeting those requirements.

Souder said blades will offer up computing at a fraction of the cost of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) servers. "You can get these things for 80 [percent to 90 percent cheaper per CPU," he noted. Oracle itself is running a grid comprising 500 blades at its Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters and 800 more in Nashua, N.H., Souder said.