Group Pushes Grid Computing In Enterprise

IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Sun Microsystems this week are set to launch the Globus Consortium, which will back the Globus Toolkit, an open-standards and open-source building block for grid implementations that has been widely used in academic and scientific settings for the past decade.

The consortium will help define specifications and requirements for the Globus Toolkit, fund code contributions and work in tandem with existing grid standards bodies such as the Global Grid Forum to promote commercial adoption. The Globus technology road map will be led by the original authors of the Globus Toolkit: Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman and Steve Tuecke, who developed the core architecture for the grid at Argonne National Laboratory. Greg Nawrocki, who also worked on the Globus Toolkit at Argonne, will serve as president of the consortium.

Nawrocki told CRN the consortium will collaborate with the authors and provide engineering talent to enhance the Globus Toolkit for enterprise use. "We have a lot of recent traction in the enterprise and share a common goal getting the Globus toolkit and aggregating them in a vendor-neutral setting." he said.

One partner said grid computing will be important in the next-generation data center, but utility computing will play a more important role in the immediate future.

"There is a fundamental difference between grid computing and utility computing," said Douglas Nassaur, president and CEO of True North Technology, Alpharetta, Ga. "While I believe both approaches offer value, the number of organizations looking to reduce the cost of desktop computing, provide single sign-on/remote-access solutions and reduce server costs as a percentage of revenue for distributed computing applications is a larger, more immediate market than the supercomputer community."