* What's on the horizon for Grid computing
Grid computing has for the most part been outside the mainstream. Executives who run corporate networks had little experience with it short of maybe reading about it in trade publications like Network World.
But that’s changing – ever so slowly mind you. This week our Special Focus takes a look at how we take a look at Grid computing in the enterprise and what inroads the technology is making.
For example a few software vendors are now shipping general-purpose applications of grids such as video streaming, large file transmission and shared data access. Meanwhile, a growing number of companies – in such industries as pharmaceuticals, electronics, auto manufacturing, energy and financial services – are piloting grid projects across their backbone networks.
In grid computing, a compute-intensive or data-intensive application is processed by many distributed computer systems connected via a LAN or WAN. Today’s grids range in size from dozens to hundreds of individual systems, which can be PCs, Unix workstations or servers. Most corporations deploy grids on their private IP networks rather than the public Internet.
Also on the horizon is a new set of standards called the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) that will make it easier for companies to roll out grid applications that work across heterogeneous networks and the Web. The Global Grid Forum, whose hundreds of members include Sun and IBM, is developing OGSA. The group plans to release the final OGSA documents in February.
Grid vendors anticipate a flood of product announcements this spring including Web server, operating system and network management software with OGSA support. For example, the Globus Project will this month release the beta version of its Globus Toolkit 3.0, which includes support for OGSA. A final version of Globus Toolkit 3.0 is due out this spring.
For more on this story see: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0127specialfocus.html
