Globus Consortium takes grid computing to the office

IBM, HP, Sun and Intel have formed the Globus Consortium, to accelerate the commercial development of grid computing.

The Consortium is an offshoot of the Globus Alliance, and will develop grid computing tools for businesses such as the Globus Toolkit, an open standards building block for commercial grid computing. The group will also fund code development.

Globus is not a standards body itself, but will work with standards bodies like the Global Grid Forum. It will also promote grid computing in the corporate world, educating businesses about the potential benefits of the technology.

Grid computing is widely used in intensive number crunching projects in research, for example, unraveling the output of particle accelerators at CERN, earthquake simulation, or in weather forecasting. It is also the technology behind co-operative computing projects like Seti@Home, or the World Computing Grid where Joe Public can donate spare computing power to tackle worthy scientific research.

However, technology companies have long had a vision of using grid technology to power business applications such as drug research, financial risk analysis, and oil exploration. ®

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