Two stories here, from the BBC and New York Times, relating to
IBM’s work on the Grid: a trial project to develop grid computing
in Europe. Linux involvement in this varies by the story: the BBC
says IBM’s project will use Linux, the New York Times makes a lot
of connections between the open source nature of some of the
software involved in the project and Linux. The links are here so
readers may judge for themselves:
From the Times:
“As part of its campaign, I.B.M. is also announcing
today that it has won two national grid projects in Europe, one in
Britain and another in the Netherlands. The I.B.M. grid initiative
will be led by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an executive with a
research background who has close ties to university and government
laboratories. Mr. Wladawsky-Berger is also heading the company’s
major support for Linux, a freely distributed operating system that
is increasingly used to power data-serving computers on the
Internet and inside corporations.Grid computing – a concept that originated in supercomputing
centers – holds the promise of transforming the Internet, according
to some computer scientists. At present, the Internet is used for
communication, mainly e- mail and instant messaging, while the Web
is the Internet’s multimedia retrieval system, enabling computer
users to have access to text, images and music.The grid would add a new dimension.”The goal is that grid
becomes the computing engine for the Internet in the way that the
Web is the information engine,” said Ken Kennedy, a professor at
Rice University. “The real long term is that this becomes the
problem-solving mechanism for society.”
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And from the BBC:
“The grid differs from the internet as it is much more
than a means of communication between computers. It would provide
huge data processing power.“You’ll get computing power and storage capacity, not from your
own computer, but over the internet on demand,” said IBM’s Irving
Wladawsky-Berger.“You pay for what you use, pretty much the way you do with
electric power.”