Getting A Grip On Grid Computing

Deep in the bowels of the USTA National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadows,
NY, a dozen producers were busy updating the US Open Web site one September
evening. They crowded around a TV and gasped as tennis star/fashionista Serena
Williams strode onto the court wearing a studded outfit and knee-high black
boots. Within moments, photos of her were up on the Web site. But while her
outfit caused a stir, the technology powering the site was just as remarkable.

To handle surges of demand from sports fans, USOpen.org was plugged into a
powerful computing grid run by IBM. Big Blue had linked dozens of servers at its
data centers so they behaved like one big computer. Any computer on the grid
could serve up a US Open Web page one minute and do bank credit analysis the
next. Customers get computing power when they need it. "It's truly an
on-demand business," says Ezra Kucharz, the USTA's managing director for
advanced media. "We get the resources we need. If we don't need them,
others use them."

After a lot of hype and a long buildup, grid computing is going mainstream.
Grids allow processing jobs to be split up and farmed out over a network to many
computers so the work can be done fast on any machine that's available-and
organizations can trim their hardware and labor costs. For years most grids were
used for scientific research. But that's changing. Analysts say 300 to 500
grids have been set up by-or for-businesses in the past year or so. And more
are on the way. Of 149 large North American companies surveyed recently by
Forrester Research, 37% have set up grids, and 30% are actively considering it.

Paying with Plastic

It's too early for any one or two tech companies to dominate the market,
but they're scrambling for advantage. IBM, which has been selling
supercomputer grid services for more than a year, announced on October 1 a wide
offering of utility-like computing services, including grids, from 11 IBM data
centers around the world. Sun Microsystems on September 21 unveiled its own
grid-on-demand service, with the wrinkle that customers can buy dollops of
computing power for an introductory price of $1 per processor per hour, and even
pay with a credit card.

Now the popularity of grids could get another boost. BusinessWeek has learned
that in October a new industry group, the Globus Consortium, will be announced.
It's rallying around a grid technology standard called Globus. Tech
heavyweights including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun, and IBM are expected to be
among the founding members. They plan to include the Globus Toolkit, open-source
software used for building grids, as a common ingredient in their grid products.
The goal: to link seamlessly hardware and software made by different companies.
This move pleases tech buyers. "We want to put things together in a grid
and not worry about lack of interaction," says Mark Cates, chief technology
officer for investment banking at Wachovia Bank, which has a grid for pricing
derivatives.

In fact, conflicting standards remain the biggest obstacle for grids. Many
major tech companies have released grid products based on their own proprietary
technologies. While most of them plan to adopt standards as they emerge, there's
one major holdout: Microsoft. So far it's sitting on the sidelines. Its
so-called Dynamic Systems Initiative, which is supposed to show up in products
next year, presumes that people who want to tap into shared computers will use
just one kind-machines running Windows. "Our approach is, first and
foremost, we'll make it work on Windows," says Charles Fitzgerald,
general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft. "There's way too much
standardization that takes place prematurely before they have done the
engineering work." Most grid software allows grids to include Windows
servers, but the process of setting up and operating those grids would be easier
if Microsoft played along.

Corporations aren't waiting for the industry to achieve mind meld before
building grids, though. DreamWorks SKG has a system that can hand off the
rendering of animations to an HP data center at night after its artists go home.
And Acxiom, which analyzes customer interactions for banks, retailers, and
credit-card issuers, uses a grid to sift through millions of records per hour.

For those willing to risk trying out a new technology, the rewards can be
rich. At most companies, each application typically runs on its own dedicated
server. As a result, analysts estimate, organizations use about 15% of their
computing power, and they spend far more on servers than needed. By distributing
work through grids, companies can save a lot of money. C. Alex Dietz, Acxiom's
chief information officer, says he cut his annual data analysis expenses in half
by switching from a single $2 million mainframe-style computer to a grid of
cheap servers running the Linux operating system. And he can process in four to
five days jobs that used to take a month.

Most grids focus on huge number-crunching jobs like Acxiom's, but that's
changing. Grids are starting to handle everyday tasks that demand instant
answers. Broker Charles Schwab & Co, for instance, has an application that
lets investment advisers sit down with clients and size up different strategies,
then ask the grid to analyze those strategies and produce scenarios. The
answers, which require billions of calculations, come back in seconds.

The dream is to tap into grids as we now plug appliances into outlets. That
goal is years off. The technologies are immature, security must be improved, and
all the standards aren't yet in place. This will be one of those advances that
takes many years to make its full impact felt. But for many corporate computer
users, it will be worth the wait.

By Steve Hamm in New York in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2004 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc

What's Driving Grid Computing?

After years of hype but not a lot of action, hundreds of companies are
starting to use grids of computers to handle large information processing jobs.
Here's why.

Cost-Cutting Pressures Using grids allows
tech purchasers to get more use out of computer servers they already have
purchased and spend less on new computers because they do not have to be as
powerful.

New Grid Technologies In the past year,
tech companies have delivered products that make it relatively easy to set up
grids-though its more complex if they don't use the same operating software.

Standards are Coming In October, the new
Globus Consortium will adopt a standard technology designed to make it easier to
set up grids comprised of different kinds of computers.

How Grid Computing Works

Here's how DreamWorks Animation uses technology to create films such as
Shrek 2 and Shark Tale

1. Artists create digital 3-D characters
and scenes on graphics workstations. These can handle design, but not the heavy
data-crunching needed to flesh out the figures.

2.
Grid software deals out the animations
in bite-size pieces to a cluster of server computers in DreamWorks data centers.
These add color, texture, and lighting.

3. If more computing is needed, work is
farmed out to more computers at a Hewlett-Packard data center. When all the
pieces are complete, they are reassembled for editing.