IBM the world's biggest computer maker and computer services provider, today said it was selected to help build out the UK’s computer grid, a cluster of servers linked together over the Internet, as well as a grid connecting five Dutch universities.
The idea of a computational grid is gaining momentum, particularly in academic communities, and companies such as IBM and others are seeking to encourage its development in the arena of big business. The idea is to link computers, from dozens of servers to potentially millions, to make processing power available on demand, rather like water or electricity.
"Now it's possible to start moving to the next stage, and that's being able to share computing capacity, storage capacity and applications over the Internet," said Mr Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an IBM veteran who is heading up the effort.
"Instead of just accessing one server and then if you need applications on another server you have to explicitly go to it and so on, you are accessing your applications on this virtual computer that includes your server and all the other servers that are part of the group," he said.
Already, elements of distributed computing, or peer-to-peer computing, or renting software over the Internet as a service, are coming to fruition. Microsoft, for example, is engaged in an ambitious plan called Microsoft.NET that will re-engineer its software applications to be delivered via the Internet.
"The grid, in my view, conceivably could be as significant as the World Wide Web," said Mr Tony Hey, director of the UK e-science program.
Specifically, Armonk, New York based IBM will build a high-end data storage facility at Oxford University, one of nine Grid centers. The national Grid center is in Edinburgh and other regional centers are at the universities of Newcastle, Belfast, Manchester, Cardiff, Cambridge, Southampton and Imperial College, London.
The IBM data storage facility will be the primary source of high-energy physics data generated at the US Particle Physics Laboratory in Chicago and then transferred to the UK.