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IBM's grid conversion

New distributed resource management standard comes to J2EE

By Robert McMillan, JavaWorld.com, 09/06/02

About a year ago, IBM Fellow Jeff Nick received an email that changed his life.

Deep within IBM's server group, Nick was doing advanced work, attempting to develop a distributed systems integration architecture that would help IBM integrate its various hardware and operating system platforms. As System 390's chief architect, Nick had been instrumental in bringing Linux onto IBM's mainframe, so he knew about radical ideas and systems architecture. His aim was to develop a layer of open interfaces, internally called the Open Services Architecture (OSA), that application and middleware developers could write to without worrying about system details. The idea, says Nick, was to "leverage the same technologies for systems integration that were being leveraged for application integration"—technologies like the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), the Internet, and emerging Web services protocols.

The email came from the general manager of IBM's Internet division, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the man who laid out IBM's e-commerce strategy in the mid-1990s and then led Big Blue's Linux initiative a few years later. Wladawsky-Berger had read a whitepaper, "The Anatomy of the Grid." Written by researchers at the University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, and Argonne National Laboratory, it was the academic community's first attempt to structure the myriad grid-related projects it used to run supercomputing-type applications across a variety of different networks and to show how these technologies might be useful outside the scientific and technical worlds.

Wladawsky-Berger's message was intriguing: "If I didn't know better, I'd have sworn you wrote this," he wrote to Nick.

Jeff Nick had heard something about grid computing. He knew about a few high-profile distributed computing applications like SETI@home, but the work that these developers were doing was much more sophisticated—and a lot closer to what he was trying to achieve with his Open Services Architecture. (See sidebar, "Grid Jargon," for more grid computing terms.)

Welcome to the grid

Beginning in 1995, with an experimental network called the I-Way, Argonne's Ian Foster and Steve Tuecke, along with Carl Kesselman from the University of Southern California had begun laying the foundations of the Globus Toolkit. Right now, the Globus Toolkit is based on a grab bag of different protocols (lightweight access directory protocol (LDAP), FTP, a custom HTTP messaging protocol, for example), but its next release, version 3.0, will be based on an emerging group of distributed computing standards called the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). Globus can be used for job submission and management, data movement, discovery, and security on a computing grid; it is to the OGSA standards what Apache is to HTTP—a production-ready, high-quality, open source reference implementation of the specs. To date, the Globus Toolkit is mainly used in the scientific and research communities. It's the technology behind the TeraGrid and the Department of Energy's Science Grid, for example, but commercial vendors, including IBM, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft are all becoming involved. Last spring, a startup called Butterfly.net launched the very first commercial grid application: a grid for online video game hosters.

 

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