Grid Meter

Digipede Wins Microsoft’s Innovation Partner of the Year Award

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-07-12T19:28:40-08:00

In a recent entry I mentioned that Digipede had been selected as a finalist for Microsoft’s Partner of the Year Award in ISV/Software Solutions Innovation. Well, it turns out that they won! From the press release: Leading grid software provider Digipede Technologies today announced it has won the Partner of the Year Award for ISV/Software Solutions, Innovation at the 2007 Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference. Digipede was chosen out of an international field of top Microsoft Partners as delivering market-leading customer solutions built on Microsoft technology. The awards were distributed at a ceremony on July 11 in Denver, CO at the... READ MORE

Recent Grid News

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-06-13T12:48:02-08:00

Grid news has been a bit lax over the last month which is understandable as we approach the summer. However, two of my favorite companies to blog on and cover in the Globus Consortium Journal, Digipede and 3Tera have had some good news lately. Digipede recently announced that it has been selected as a finalist for Microsoft’s Partner of the Year Award in ISV/Software Solutions Innovation. 3Tera and British Telecom have recently entered into a deal for 3Tera to provide their AppLogic grid operating system to power utility computing services over British Telecom’s network. Both of these companies take a... READ MORE

The Grid and the Web - Open Standards and Open Source

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-05-21T09:21:39-08:00

Last week I was asked why open source was important to Grid. I'll admit, had to stop and think for a while. We've all heard the reasons or ensuring interoperability and avoiding vendor lock-in, but these are benefits usually applied to open standards as opposed to open source. So I started thinking about the difference between open standards and open source, which lead me to the following phrase. Open standards dictate what is possible today, open source is the enabler for what is possible in the future. I came to that phrase while drawing analogies between the Web and Grid.... READ MORE

Ground Swell for Grid - Where it May Come From

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-05-08T11:49:39-08:00

CIO Insight recently gave some nice press coverage to a company I've been following for a while now, RevStor. In a nutshell the RevStor product SANware builds a niftly little data grid seamlessly, with a very easy turn-key install, to provide the benefits of a Storage Area Network. The target market is small to medium size businesses that need a data replication solution for distribution and redundancy. I've covered RevStor in this blog and in the Globus Consortium Journal and it is nice to see them getting more press play. It is no secret that the mass uptake of grid... READ MORE

Open Source Pioneer Shifts Focus

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-04-26T08:09:00-08:00

With the final version of GPLv3 in sight, Eben Moglen, a leader of the Free Software Foundation and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center has indicated that he will be leaving the former to concentrate more on the latter. That, and teaching at Columbia. Moglen is an excellent speaker and gives a great interview. I don't think I've ever heard someone who has such a complete grasp of such a complex subject as the legal and licensing aspects of free software and making sure it stays that way. His enthusiasm for that subject is contagious and he has a... READ MORE

Grid-Compliant Open Source Portals

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-04-23T12:14:20-08:00

I recently downloaded a copy of the Grid-Compliant Open Source Portals report from GridwiseTech. It is a comprehensive, yet very readable synopsis of GridSphere, Liferay and uPortal, all web-based applications that provide an "ease of use layer" to more in depth functionality. In the case of this particular report that includes grid functionality. While this report is certainly targeted at a particular audience it really reads quite nicely which means that you can determine quickly for yourself if you are indeed among that targeted audience. It also illustrates that the folks at GridwiseTech are quite good at these reports and... READ MORE

GridwiseTech Report On Open Source Portals

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-04-05T08:50:18-08:00

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Pawel Plaszczak, President of GridwiseTech. Pawel had some interesting perspectives on Grid in Europe and the market in general. My interview was coincident with some other good news from this vendor-independent Grid computing expert. Pawel was kind enough to give me a sneak peek at some other good news which we should see from GridwiseTech shortly. GridwiseTech is scheduled to release an exclusive report on Grid-Compliant Open Source Portals. It will be available for free via download from the company's website and is targeted at technology investigators from various business sectors in the... READ MORE

Grid and Utility Computing Webinar

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-03-27T08:19:53-08:00

From a recent press release: In a free Xtalks webinar on Wednesday, April 10, 2007, 1:00 - 3:00pm EDT, Nicholas Carr, former Executive Editor, Harvard Business Review, Author of "Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corosion of Competitive Advantage", Bert Armijo, Co-founder and VP Product Management, 3tera, Inc., and Todd Abrams, President and COO, Layered Technologies will consider grid and utility computing and the changes it is bringing to the data centers today. Although I am not familiar with Todd Abrams, I certainly am with the other two speakers. In fact, in a previous conference that I chaired we... READ MORE

Six New Globus Incubator Projects

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-03-12T09:23:11-08:00

There has been a host of good news from the various Globus teams, and the following is the icing on the cake. While the addition of new incubator projects is noteworthy, having the GridWay project "graduate" from incubator to full Globus project is indeed significant news. This shows that the incubator process is working and projects brought in on a probationary basis indeed have the ability to become part of the toolkit in its distributed form. Given that similar processes are used in the enterprise space this is an indicator that dev.globus considers itself a contender in more than the... READ MORE

Supercharging Your Cluster With Univa Globus

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-03-09T07:26:35-08:00

On Tuesday, March 20, Univa Corporation will present the first in a series of free Webinars on best practices for cluster and grid computing, "Supercharging Your Cluster With Univa Globus". Univa has asked me to moderate the discussion segment of this Webinar and I'm looking forward to the chance for Univa to be able to "post up" with their value add. Details for this Webinar: Date: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Time: 10:30am - 11:30am CST Presenters: Steve Tuecke, Univa CTO and Co-Founder and Carl Kesselman, Univa Chief Scientist and Co-Founder What Attendees Will Learn If you are considering, or already... READ MORE

Swift for Grid Workflow Management

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-03-07T08:01:21-08:00

It doesn't take a great deal of searching through the history of this blog to hear me harping about the need for mainstream Grid applications to accelerate all the technologies that we've come to know under the Grid umbrella. I'll confess that I use the term application pretty loosely. It doesn't necessarily mean a single program but could be a series of programs or even simple scripts that tie together to form what is often called a workflow. Essentially any set of processes for getting real work done. In the case of workflows the complexity of task management is added... READ MORE

Univa Shows Its Open Source Chops

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-03-06T09:12:27-08:00

Univa Corporation recently announced the open source release of the Univa Data Distribution Manager (DDM) as a Globus Incubator project. Univa DDM is a new service that builds upon the robust features provided by the Globus Toolkit including the C and Java Web Services Core, GridFTP, GRAM, and RLS (among others) by adding the capability for data set specification, a range of synchronization modes, replica selection, and a comprehensive set of policy based failure recovery mechanisms. Key features of this current release include: Multi-site replication with updates: Univa DDM supports both a write-once / read-many and a sequential update model... READ MORE

3tera's Grid University

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-03-01T08:27:00-08:00

The Grid Operating system vendor 3tera recently announced the launching of their Grid University for interactive education on Utility Computing. And they got some pretty good press play from the announcement as well. I've covered 3tera and their Grid OS AppLogic in this blog and in an interview in the Globus Consortium Journal. I've seen their product in action, and quite frankly it seems so intuitive to me that a class on AppLogic itself might not even be needed. But 3tera has taken the extra step to show how to integrate, deploy and maintain an AppLogic Grid in a variety... READ MORE

More Cycle Scavenging

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-02-13T09:10:48-08:00

MacResearch.org, a community of Mac users in scientific computing recently announced OpenMacGrid. In a nutshell, yet another collective Grid for HPC cycle scavenging. I still think that the Mac community is the sleeping giant of Grid, whether that is used in the classic HPC sense or the more modern virtualization sense, and this is one of the first wide scale implementation of Xgrid that I've seen. However, we've all been here before with SETI@home and other cycle scavenging efforts. I'd be much more impressed, and perhaps selfishly so, if there were some collective for trading cycles to get iMovie or... READ MORE

When is a Machine not a Machine

Greg Nawrocki — 2007-02-08T09:15:26-08:00

While the facts in this article are inherently flawed (the home version of MS Vista will indeed run on a Mac under Boot Camp), the premise behind this article brings up an interesting point that the Grid computing world has danced around for years, licensing issues. In Grid computing, licensing concerns were more directed towards multiple instances of one application on several different machines, in the virtualization world the issue is "when is a machine not a machine". The premise behind the above article (and I use the term premise loosely as I do not have a copy of the... READ MORE