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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
MCNC FIRST TO JOIN GGF,
EGA
MCNC will announce at Grid Today 2004 (Gt'04) that it has joined the Global
Grid
Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance -- the first to join both following the
announced formation of the Enterprise Grid Alliance in April. MCNC's goal is
to work with members of the organizations to help establish a mutually
beneficial relationship between the Global Grid Forum standards organization
and the commercial-focused Enterprise Grid Alliance.
"As an early adopter of Grid computing, MCNC has identified the challenges
in
deploying, operating, and scaling a production Grid infrastructure," said
David Rizzo, chief executive officer of MCNC. "We are committed to the tenet
that common standards are of utmost importance to ensure that equipment and
applications from multiple vendors work together. By joining both of these
organizations, MCNC will continue its work to accelerate the adoption, and
delivery of the tremendous benefits, of Grid computing technology for academic
research and commercial customer communities."
MCNC believes that the future of Grid computing is unfolding in three waves
of
adoption. First, as academia has led the development of the Internet, the
academic research community has driven the development of the first wave of
Grid computing over the past five years. Today, commercial interest in Grid
computing is a catalyst for the second wave of adoption that is centered on,
and is delivering substantial benefits to, businesses and industry. On the
horizon is the third wave of adoption that will deliver benefits to consumers
and is predicted to be even more pervasive and significant than the Internet
is today.
MCNC has now formalized its relationship with the Global Grid Forum
following
its active involvement in the organization's working groups in the past five
years. MCNC conducts its own research and participates in the Global Grid
Forum's working groups addressing a broad range of topics, including
information security and retrieval, joint collaboration, applications,
middleware and network infrastructure provisioning.
"The Global Grid Forum has done a wonderful job creating the Grid community
and working on a multitude of Grid computing issues, including the development
of standards and best practices," said Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of
MCNC Grid Computing & Networking Services and the former senior director of
Grid computing for Sun Microsystems Inc.
Gentzsch said that the Global Grid Forum drove the first wave of Grid
computing development and will continue to drive the evolution of Grid
computing in the future.
"Now that vendors have created even more interest from commercial companies
who want to seize the wealth of benefits that Grid computing provides, the
Enterprise Grid Alliance is simply following the demand of their customers to
accelerate the near-term requirements for deployment of enterprise Grid
computing," he said. "With a keen focus on the implementation of standards in
vendor products to ensure interoperability among competitors, we consider the
Enterprise Grid Alliance to be complementary to the current Global Grid Forum
work."
Since it was founded in 1980, MCNC has collaborated on technology research,
development and deployment with customers, providers and vendors in academia,
government and industry. MCNC led the creation of one of the nation's first
Grid computing test beds in 2001, the North Carolina Bioinformatics Grid, and
is currently developing one of the nation's first statewide Grid services
networks in partnership with the University of North Carolina 16-campus
system. The statewide Grid will serve as a reference implementation for
commercial use of Grid computing within the enterprise and across
organizational boundaries.
As an independent organization, MCNC knows from experience that customers
demand heterogeneous Grid computing solutions. MCNC has embraced an
evolutionary roadmap in the development and deployment of Grid computing that
spans the interests of all three waves of adoption -- research, commercial and
consumer. With MCNC's Grid testing and evaluation facilities, and its historic
commitment to deploy Grid technology in both test bed and production
environments, MCNC is in an ideal position to help drive standard interfaces,
interoperability and deployment of Grid solutions.
Statements about MCNC from the Global Grid Forum and from the Enterprise
Grid
Alliance, about joining the two organizations, are available in the Media
Center on the MCNC web site at www.mcnc.org.
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