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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 1, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 35
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Special Features:
GRIDS MOVE TOWARD MATURITY
by
Rachel Chalmers for the451.com
In a remarkable shift over the six months since we last published a
spotlight
on Grid computing, the technology has moved from technical arcana to full-
fledged buzzword status. Companies as conservative as CA and Microsoft have
declared in-principle support for Grid architectures. HP has made Grid a key
element of its Planetary Computing plans -- while hedging its bet with bottom-
up Web services offerings for next-generation network and systems management.
Oracle says the next integer release of its database will be Grid-enabled,
while IBM claims to have 100 Grid computing customers up and running
today.
Grids are red-hot at opposite ends of the hardware spectrum. On the
mainframe
side, a new z/VM release lets users configure IBM z990s as Grids, either
internally or as one in a series of nodes. Meanwhile in commodity-server land,
Sun plans to deliver Grid-enabled versions of its x86-based V60x and Sparc-
based V210. The machines will be bundled with Sun Control Station and Sun ONE
GridEngine software. As a further reflection of rising interest in Grids, Sun
has combined its high-performance and technical computing teams into a single
unit under the leadership of Shahin Khan.
Sun is also hard at work on its distributed resource management application
API, or DRMAA (pronounced "drama"). The idea is to let ISVs write a single
application to work with multiple resource managers. Intel and Cadence have
backed the spec, but IBM and Platform argue that customers want
interoperability on a per-application, per-ISV and per-customer basis. That's
why their competing push, the New Productivity Initiative (NPI), was folded
into the Global Grid Forum. IBM is now throwing its weight behind the Open
Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), which describes the convergence of Grid
technologies and Web services under the auspices of Globus. Sun has yet to
commit itself to a position for or against OGSA.
And that's just the major players. At the startup level, the competitive
landscape has changed almost beyond recognition, with the top resource pooling
players -- Jareva, Terraspring and Think Dynamics -- snapped up by Veritas,
Sun and IBM, respectively. This wave of mergers leaves two big questions in
its wake: What will HP do now that Terraspring, whose software it licensed as
part of its Utility Data Computing initiative, belongs to its fierce
competitor Sun? And what will become of Ejasent and Metilinx, the last
in-class contenders left standing?
Finally, there are the CPU scavengers, many of which grew out of the
all-too-
brief summer of peer-to-peer: Avaki, DataSynapse, Entropia, GridIron Software,
Parabon, Tsunami Research and United Devices. All would like to climb the
stack and take on Platform LSF and Sun GridEngine. UD, for example, recently
created financing, consulting, impact assessment and hosting programs aimed at
overcoming enterprise objections to the organizational changes required by its
MetaProcessor for Grid computing. Interestingly, the company recently wooed VP
of marketing and business development Paul Kirchoff away from Dell, a
potentially major player that has yet to declare its hand.
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