Grid Computing News : Grid Forum Goes to Europe

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is taking its grid computing standards work to Europe, with a little help from the European Commission. OGF-Europe , funded by the European Commission for Mobilizing and Integrating Communities on Grid Standards and Best Practices Globally, will help "capitalize on European Commission investments in Grid technologies by driving grid adoption and innovation across Europe in research, government and industry," OGF said in a statement. OGF-Europe was launched in keeping with OGF's mission of "pervasive grid adoption through interoperable software standards." The new group will offer outreach seminars and workshops, adoption challenges and recommendations reports, community surveys, best practice reports and tutorials. Silvana Muscella, technical coordinator of OGF-Europe and director of OGF.eeig, said OGF-Europe "will be essential in bringing enterprise and e-science communities together to break down barriers and foster mainstream grid adoption." OGF-Europe's first Community Outreach Seminar will be held in the UK this spring. The formation of the new group is well timed; OGF23, the Grid Forum's quarterly international meeting, will be held in Barcelona in June.... read more

Grid Computing News : Sun Expands Grid Application Offerings

Sun Microsystems has added 14 new applications to its Network.com Application Catalog of online grid-enabled applications available from the Sun Grid compute utility service on a pay-per-use basis. Sun also launched a new partner program, Sun Network.com Connection, for independent software vendors (ISVs) to create on-demand service offerings at lower risk and cost, with access to new sales channels. The latest additions bring the grid service's total number of "Click and Run" applications to 39. Mark Herring, Sun's senior director of software marketing, said Network.com "is evolving into a virtual on-demand data center that allows businesses of any size to leverage compute infrastructure without the cost of ownership and with the flexibility of scaling up or down compute resources in real time as business demands change." The latest applications include Blender, open source tools for modeling, rendering, animation, post-production, creation and playback of interactive 3D content. Sun is sponsoring Blender Foundation's open movie "Peach," a short 3D animation by artists and developers in the Blender community, with grants of CPU hours in Network.com.... read more

Grid Computing News : Aspeed Gets Acquired

Aspeed Software, which made a name for itself with technology for grid-enabling applications, has been acquired by SIMtone Corp. SIMtone, a desktop virtualization and utility computing firm, said it will use Aspeed's application acceleration and optimization solutions to get the most out of server and hardware platforms and virtualization platforms from VMware, Microsoft and XenSource. Aspeed Software is used by financial firms to boost compute-intensive risk management applications in multi-core, cluster, grid and virtualized environments, and to transition from shared memory Unix systems to Linux- and Windows-based platforms. SIMtone CEO and chairman Mario Dal Canto said in a statement that "Aspeed technology broadly applied to the SIMtone end-to-end Virtual Cloud Computing platform will deliver an unparalleled virtual desktop user experience and expand the scalability and availability of the applications and servers." SIMtone's virtual desktop services use the company's universal dialtone technology to let users access their virtual desktops from PCs, terminals and mobile devices, helping organizations to save on technology infrastructure costs typically associated with distributed computing environments. We were delighted to see the number of clients that we have in common." SIMtone will continue to support and expand the Aspeed customer base and relationships with Intel, Microsoft and other business partners.... read more

Grid Computing News : Project Makes Grids Work Together

Researchers from Europe, the U.S. and China are developing software that will make compute grids interoperable, which could boost computing power and collaboration on critical research projects. The two-year-old EU-funded OMII-Europe (Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute) project aims to unite the gLite, Globus and UNICORE grid computing platforms, which are widely used in major European Grid projects. The researchers, led by Alistair Dunlop of the UK's University of Southampton, will give a demonstration later this month at Open Grid Forum (OGF) 22 in Cambridge, Mass. The OMII project is built around five components — a Basic Execution Service, a Data Integration Service, a Virtual Organization Membership Service, an Accounting Service and Portal Capability.... read more