Grid Meter » Meet the Meter

August 19, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Meet the Meter

TAGS: None

Greetings InfoWorld readers. Thanks for stopping by Grid Meter.

So why the heck would InfoWorld (such a great source for ENTERPRISE pros) let a former propellerhead from the Department of Energy do a blog about enterprise-level Grid computing, you might ask? Allow me to offer just the cursory intro, so you know where I'm coming from and what value I'm hoping to bring to you with this new blog.

Just over two years ago, I left the consumer products embedded systems world and started working with Ian Foster at Argonne National Lab in Illinois. Ian, of course, is one of the original pioneers of Grid -- and played a key role in the creation of the most widely used open source Grid computing standard, the Globus Toolkit. Ian and his colleagues first kicked off the Globus Toolkit project about ten years ago, with the intention of enabling large-scale compute resource sharing among e-Scientists (for things like advanced particle phsyics, earthquake simulations, etc.).

In the recent past, the Globus Toolkit has branched out from just e-Science, and is now also used in commercial settings -- like in financial, where many large institutions use it as the standard Grid middleware for doing Monte Carlo simulations and the like. Recently, a set of enterprise vendors (IBM, HP, Intel, Sun, Nortel Networks, Univa) kicked off the Globus Consortium, to continue to support the evolution of the Globus Toolkit open source in enterprise settings (I'm the President of the Globus Consortium). We believe that open source is the key to mainstream enterprise Grid adoption -- and that open standards in Grid will be every bit as important as TCP/IP was to the commercial Internet.

So now that there's been some fair disclosure about who I am (and my axe to Grind) -- I'm looking forward to writing about the most compelling open source Grid projects, personalities, issues and debates out there in enterprise today. I believe that one of the reasons why enterprise IT pros are having such a tough time making sense of Grid computing is the degree of vendor hype around the technology. The goal of this blog is to get beyond that vendor hype and address the real issues and barriers to adoption out there.

Email me anytime.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on August 19, 2005 02:20 PM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: