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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Systems/Enterprise:
IBM OFFERS SPECIALIZED GRIDS TO
FIVE KEY INDUSTRIES
IBM is expanding its Grid program into the commercial sector, offering
programs to the aerospace, government, life sciences, financial and automotive
industries. The company already is working with Charles Schwab on
Grid-enabling its headquarters in San Francisco.
The first research and development project is already finished, and
processor
effiency has been maximized and the time to process a financial application
has been cut from four minutes to 15 seconds. If implemented, the faster
processing time could lead to increased satisfaction among customers. The
companies hope to spread Grid research into more areas of Charles Schwab's
business.
IBM, along with Charles Schwab's Advanced Technology Group, Grid-enabled a
non-IBM application with the Globus Toolkit running Red Hat Linux on IBM
xSeries 330 machines.
In addition to its work with Charles Schwab, IBM also has formed master
relationship agreements with Platform Computing and DataSynapse to aid in
enterprise Grid deployment. These two companies join United Devices, Avaki and
Entropia on the list of IBM's Grid partners.
The belief at IBM is that enterprise Grid computing is set to take off,
especially with the introduction of the Globus Toolkit 3.0.
Web services, utility computing, .NET, CPU harvesting and distributed
computing are just a few of the technologies that fall under the Grid
computing umbrella. Gt04 -- a premiere enterprise Grid computing conference
targeting industrial and commercial users -- will gather experts, and outline
strategies and road maps for Grid deployment. For more information, visit
www.gt04.com.
Grid computing is here!
IBM will focus on on five areas when working with the five aforementioned
industries (aerospace, government, life sciences, financial, automotive). The
focus areas are research and development, engineering and design, business
analytics, enterprise optimization, and government development.
Based on these, IBM is introducing 10 Grid offerings:
- Financial Markets -- Financial services customers will have two Grid
options to choose from. An Analytics Acceleration Grid will increase the speed
of running analytical operations and computational throughput. The IT
Optimization Grid, on the other hand, will help companies maximize efficiency
by allowing them to exploit underutilized compute and storage
resources.
- Life Sciences -- Life sciences customers also will have two Grid
options
available, one of which is an Analytics Acceleration Grid. The other is an
Information Accessibility Grid -- designed to maximize the exploitation of
existing data resources and assets by providing unified data access during the
querying process of non-standard data formats.
- Automotive and Aerospace -- These two industries have the option of
deploying either an Engineering Design Grid or a Design Collaboration Grid.
The prior is designed to help companies manage their costs by optimizing the
use of their investment in existing infrastructure, while the latter is
designed to enable data sharing and distributed work flow across partners,
which will enable faster design processes.
- Governments -- Government agencies can implement an Information Access
Grid. It will help customers in this area by minimizing the time necessary to
capture, compile and analyze data. It also should aid in facilitating the
sharing of information.
IBM also is offering Grid Innovation Workshops, which are customized to
each
individual organization, and help companies see how Grid implementation could
benefit them.
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