GRIDtoday editor, Derrick Harris, highlights some of the continuing events at GridWorld 2006. After two days worth of presentations and conversations with all sorts of smart people spanning the Grid spectrum, Derrick relays some of the key moments at the conference, including the revelations on how eBay is utilizing Grid technology, Grid success in the SMB market, and the sentiments discussed by GRIDtoday Publisher, Tom Tabor, at the announcement of the GRIDtoday Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards. [more]

In his GridWorld presentation on Tuesday, Wolfgang Gentzsch, head of D-Grid and visiting scientist at RENCI, presented the results of a recent study which evaluated and compared six major Grid projects around the world that are based on the Globus Toolkit Grid middleware. Based on the experiences of early adopters, the aim of the study was to help the community to better understand, build, manage and operate grids. He presented a list of lessons learned and offered a number recommendations that may help others to successfully plan, implement, operate and fund similar Grid projects in the near future. [more]

Ken King is Vice President, Grid Computing with responsibility for worldwide business line management of IBM's Grid Computing initiatives, including business and technical strategy. GRIDtoday Editor, Derrick Harris caught up with him to discuss IBM's Grid and Grow program, the buzz on SOA and virtualization, and where the ceiling is for the Open Grid Forum. [more]

The emergence of new service-oriented architecture technologies in the last five years has resulted in an increasing emphasis on collaborative working environments across virtual organizations. The case for wider enterprise Grid adoption has depended on proving that Grid delivers overall improvements in IT efficiency, addresses the key challenges every data center faces, and provides a compelling business reason for adoption. Dave Pearson, a senior director in Oracle Corporation, provides case studies that illustrate that Grid is capable of addressing these challenges. [more]

In today's world, increased computing power applied to design translates into a shorter product development cycle, fewer physical prototypes, more efficient use of materials, quicker time to market and additional opportunities to innovate. Overall, computing power can deliver a clear competitive edge. But how can companies corral their computing power--and maximize its performance? Bill Nitzberg, CTO for Altair Engineering, makes the case that deploying workload management software makes the most economical sense when it comes to the challenges of corralling computing power and maximizing its performance. [more]

Hanoch Eiron, marketing director for Hewlett Packard's Oracle Global Alliance, believes that, from a public perception standpoint, grids are in a trough. He offers his thoughts on the premature Grid hype of the past few years, the real benefits of Grid computting, and the need for the community to do a better job of explaining the role and benefits of this technology to the industry at large. [more]

Early adopters of Grid computing have indicated that many are looking for ways to move beyond the use of grids specifically for computational tasks. They want to eliminate silos and organize IT around shared resources, simplify access to data and provide a single, consistent view of the business for the entire enterprise. William Fellows, a Principal Analyst at New York-based The 451 Group, discusses the challenge of getting "beyond the compute grid" and the procession towards "Grid 2.0." [more]

The Belfast eScience Centre, in collaboration with the British Broadcasting Corporation, British Telecom, GMS Ltd and QinetiQ plc, is investigating Grid ideas and technologies in the broadcasting technical infrastructure. Their first project, Gridcast, completed in 2005, investigated Grid technology for the internal technical infrastructure for analogue broadcasting. Their second project, PeRvasive Infrastructure of Services for Media (PRISM), is currently investigating Grid technology in the emerging pervasive media economy. In this article, Terry Harmer, Technical Director of the Belfast e-Science Centre, outlines the Gridcast project and the PRISM R&D project, and discusses the use of grids in the broadcast domain. [more]

The UK e-Science Programme has invested more than $450 million since its inception in 2001. This is R&D for grids, their deployment and research projects exploiting grids. It does not include the investment in HPC, cluster computing and improving networks. Malcolm Atkinson, Director of the e-Science Institute, discusses the ambitious vision of e-Science to transform research and industry using advanced Grid computing as a catalyst. [more]

GRIDtoday editor Derrick Harris highlights some of the opening day events at GridWorld 2006. The editor gives his take on the Dan Atkins' keynote address and the Funding Agency Roundtable discussion. Ian Foster's keynote and the ensuing 10th birthday party for the Globus Toolkit also attracts the attention of Harris. [more]

The GlobusWORLD conference being held jointly with GridWorld and the Open Grid Forum this week in Washington, D.C., is a significant milestone for those involved in the development and use of the Globus open source Grid software. The reason is that it was 10 years ago -- to be precise, on Aug. 21, 1996 -- that Carl Kesselman and Ian Foster received their first funding for work on Globus, from DARPA. In this article, Foster recaps the history of Globus and reflects on the current state of the software. [more]

Dr. Jikku Venkat, chief technology officer at United Devices, delivered a presentation at GridWorld in Washington, D.C. this week that described the inevitability of Grid becoming a critical management tool in large-scale data centers. Based on data center projects United Devices already has under way, Dr. Venkat gave a broad outline of how Grid technologies are evolving and how data centers will benefit. [more]

The field of Grid computing for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) has received relatively little attention. While the Grid community has trumpeted the advancement of enterprise grids over the past two years, real-world success stories of grids in SMBs have been less common. This is surprising, given the speed with which SMBs can make decisions. SMBs are far more nimble than large enterprises in their ability to adopt and wring value from new technologies. To illustrate this point, here are three very different SMBs that have adopted and benefited from Grid computing in their businesses. [more]

The Open Science Grid (OSG) Consortium is facing head-on the challenge of operating a wide-flung distributed infrastructure for multi-disciplinary research groups. The OSG facility provides access to compute and storage resources at more than fifty DOE and NSF sponsored universities and laboratories in the United States, as well as several universities internationally. These resources are locally owned and managed facilities that range from a few tens to thousands of CPUs, provide a few terabytes to petabytes of storage, and are connected through production and research networks. OSG provides the mechanisms to connect these existing sites together. [more]

While grids are well-suited for high performance scientific research, the commercial adoption of Grid technology has also been on the rise for many years. In the financial services industry, companies use grids of Linux servers with customized software to run sophisticated analytics requiring very fast response times. EMC's Ian Baird discusses how information-intensive industries are exploring the use of grids with specialized software to run a range of business applications. [more]

In this Q&A with GRIDtoday, Paul Strong, distinguished research scientist at eBay Research Labs, discusses eBay's cutting-edge use of Grid technologies -- from where it began to where the online auction leader hopes it to go. In addition, Strong, who has been and continues to be very involved with the Enterprise Grid Alliance, gives his views on the opportunities and challenges facing the newly formed Open Grid Forum. [more]

As many of GRIDtoday's readers know, the Open Grid Forum (OGF) was formed from the merger of the Global Grid Forum (GGF) and the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA). As a single organization, we are able to bring more of the Grid community together around the "same table" to accelerate results, communicate more clearly and collaborate more effectively. [more]