More firms harness grid power

Grid computing is gaining acceptance within corporate firewalls and in networks beyond organisational boundaries, according to two new reports

An 18-month-old Enabling Grids for E-science (EGEE) project, coordinated by European nuclear research group Cern and part-funded by the European Commission (EC), has reported that its efforts to create a global grid infrastructure for scientific activity now covers over 150 sites in 40 countries.

Over 1,000 users are using the grid for research projects for activities such as particle physics and anti-malarial drug development.

"The results for EGEE are well beyond our initial expectations," said Fabrizio Gagliardi, EGEE project director at Cern. "[The grid service] will allow many scientists to do calculations that were once hugely time-consuming much faster."
Oracle's third Grid Index report, released last week, also suggests that deployments and aware- ness of grids are increasing, though the UK lags behind Scandinavian countries and the US.

"The results are encouraging and there has been an increase in all of the indices," said Bob Tarzey, service director at analyst firm Quocirca, which conducted the research.

Stephen Thornton, database and grid solutions leader at Oracle, said, "The surprising thing is how fast [grids are] growing. Twelve months ago we would have been talking about Cern. This year it's medium-sized organisations who want to deploy this stuff now."

Shahid Mohammed, senior database manager at publisher Trader Media, said, " We've had continuing problems where our online systems are getting busier. Deploying grids helped us reduce outages and improve utilisation."

However, Oracle said its sales are going almost exclusively for what it calls "enterprise grids" - clusters that sit in internal datacentres or are connected by corporate wide-area network links. Most grid advocates use the term "grids" to denote architectures that span administrative domains.