BBC and the New York Times: IBM Gets Behind Grid Computing

Aug 03, 2001, 00:33 (3 Talkback[s])

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."

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