IBM Accelerates Grid-Computing Efforts For ISVsIBM Accelerates Grid-Computing Efforts For ISVs

Grid computing already is close to being a $1 billion business for IBM. Now the company is stepping up its efforts to make sure its independent software vendor partners are onboard the grid-computing bandwagon.

This week IBM said it will hold a series of three-day workshops in 2005 to tutor ISVs in the ways of grid computing, including helping them adapt their software for grid-computing architectures and providing hands-on experience with a live grid-computing network.

Sales of IBM products for grid computing, primarily servers and other hardware, already are close to $1 billion, according to Ken King, IBM grid computing VP. But software and services will account for a growing share of that, King said during a grid-computing forum IBM held on Tuesday in its Waltham, Mass., facility. IDC forecasts that grid computing will be a $12 billion industry by 2007 and IBM has identified it as a key emerging business opportunity.

King defined grid computing as the ability to integrate heterogeneous IT resources such as CPUs and data storage and operate those resources as a single virtual computer.

Grid computing today requires a lot of custom integration of proprietary technologies, King said. But grid-computing technology standards such as the Globus Toolkit are maturing and grid computing is following an adoption pattern similar to the Internet in the 1990s, he said. Web services are crucial for grid-computing and the two technologies are converging, he added.

King named Charles Schwab, Ford, General Motors, and Wachovia as some of the companies IBM is working with to implement grid-computing systems. He said financial services, telecommunications, automotive, and chemical companies are showing the most interest in grid computing, as well as organizations in health-care and life-sciences research.

Sefas Innovation SA, which uses IBM mainframes to process, print, and distribute documents such as bank statements and utility bills, began using grid-computing techniques earlier this year to reduce production times. At Tuesday's forum, Herve Collins, Sefas' operations VP, said some computational tasks are now split off from the main production process, run in parallel on an IBM blade server, then recombined with the main process.

Collins said some production jobs have been reduced from days to hours and one job from six hours to six minutes. Production costs on some jobs, he said, have been cut by 90%.

Massachusetts General Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, is working with IBM to develop a grid-computing system for processing the huge volumes of data generated by life-sciences research. Thomas Deisboeck, assistant professor of radiology, said the technology will be used to develop analytical models for cancer research.

Last month IBM launched a grid-computing project called the World Community Grid that taps into PCs worldwide to create a virtual supercomputer to tackle computational tasks as varied as AIDS research to earthquake forecasting.

King said some 30 of IBM's ISV partners have already grid-enabled their applications and he expects another 40 or 50 to do so in 2005. The three-day workshops will be held in IBM's Innovation Centers in Waltham, Mass.; San Mateo, Calif.; and Hursley, U.K.