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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / AUGUST 18, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 33
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Systems/Enterprise:
SAS JOINS GRID COMPUTING
FORUM
SAS announced that it has become the first enterprise business intelligence
vendor to join the Global Grid Forum - an industry association formed to
advance grid computing. Through its advanced multiprocessing capabilities,
which are available to every SAS tool and solution, SAS enables IT
organizations and application developers to create a distributed computing
environment that leverages unused computing resources to obtain information
that would otherwise take weeks or months to process. The ability to do this
is at the heart of grid computing. "We currently have customers from a variety
of industries that are using SAS technology in a grid environment to reduce
total elapsed execution time on a project by as much as 99 percent," said
Keith Collins, SAS' senior vice president and chief technology officer. "Grid
computing enables our customers to do more with less - ultimately lowering the
total cost of ownership."
Grid computing is a method of harnessing the power of many computers in a
network to solve problems requiring a large number of processing cycles and
involving huge volumes of data. Grid computing taps the unused processor
capacity of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of computers. In this way,
users can achieve much faster results on large projects at a lower cost.
Organizations using SAS' technology in a grid computing environment
significantly speed up processing times for their jobs. The National Institute
of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), located in North Carolina, has
implemented a grid that helps them achieve a 95 percent reduction in total
elapsed execution time on key research projects. "Grid computing has enabled
NIEHS to see an impressive breakthrough in statistical analysis computations,
which aids our scientists in quickly examining their data," said Roy Reter, IT
security officer and systems administrator for NIEHS' Division of Intramural
Research.
"SAS software has been critical in making this reduction in execution time
possible," added John Grovenstein, computational scientist at the NIEHS.
"Through SAS' involvement with the Global Grid Forum, the NIEHS will stay at
the forefront of new developments in grid computing technology and standards.
This will enable us to more quickly deliver critical results that impact our
environmental health."
According to Insight Research, worldwide grid spending will soar from $250
million in 2003 to $4.89 billion in 2008 (Grid Computing: A Vertical Market
Perspective 2003-2008). Born out of the academic research arena, grid
computing has been recognized as the natural evolution of the Internet and is
quickly becoming an important development in the IT sector as the value of
grid computing is realized through the implementation experience from early
adopters.
"Grid computing allows our customers to handle their exploding workload
requirements to get the information they need in a reasonable timeframe while
also staying within IT budgets," continued Collins. "SAS' large-scale parallel
processing capabilities are integral in furthering the development of grid
computing. Our involvement in the Global Grid Forum will enable us to exchange
knowledge and information with industry leaders in order to advance our
current grid capabilities, as well as to help shape the grid computing
industry in general."
About the Global Grid Forum
The Global Grid Forum (GGF) is a community-initiated forum of more than
5,000
individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or
"grid," technologies. GGF's primary objective is to promote and support the
development, deployment and implementation of grid technologies and
applications via the creation and documentation of best practices, including
technical specifications, user experiences and implementation guidelines. The
next GGF meeting, GGF9, will be held in Chicago Oct. 5-8, and is expected to
include more than 1,000 global grid leaders. More information about GGF can be
found at www.ggf.org.
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