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March 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)
HP Expected to Announce ChinaGrid Project Efforts ...
Last week, Kenneth Li at Reuters weighed in on the opportunities for US IT vendors trying to tap into the market in China, and cited a whopping, "near double-digit economic growth" for the country in 2005. For the vendors that can get past the red tape, there's a lot of gold in them thar hills.
In the Grid world, some U.S. vendors are planting seeds for future success in China by participating in the ChinaGrid project (pdf), one of the world's largest Grid implementations (seeking to support more than 290 million Chinese students and researchers). ChinaGrid is pretty analogous to the TeraGrid effort here in the U.S., albeit on a slightly smaller scale (TeraGrid has 50 teraflops of compute power; ChinaGrid has 15). Most of ChinaGrid's applications have a heavy research flavor (image processing, bioinformatics, large scale information processing, etc.) -- however, ChinaGrid also supports online courses for remote students, and it would appear that the door is open for other content-delivery types of applications as well.
Tomorrow, HP's Beijing Lab is expected to announce their recent contributions to the China Grid (according to the release, "HP has had an established presence in China for more than 20 years and powers many of the IT systems of the country's universities"). For ChinaGrid -- HP's ProLiant and Integrity servers apparently provide a substantial portion of the Grid's compute power. HP is also developing security software agents and participating in the construction of a monitoring system.
For all of the concern about the government bureaucracy that must be navigated to penetrate the Chinese market -- tech vendors are wise to participate in projects like ChinaGrid. And Apple and Microsoft proved how successful it is to put an emerging technology into students' hands. As one Slashdot reader recently pointed out, "[b]oth Apple and Microsoft realize that the toys people have in college become the toys they demand in real life."
If ChinaGrid does start bundling in more content delivery / entertainment applications -- that sure plays out well for a company like HP, with such a broad range of enterprise and consumer technologies.
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on March 6, 2006 11:05 AM
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