IBM is taking the Grid Computing technology that it has been
developing with academic institutes and offering it as a commercial
service to businesses that need massive number crunching
capabilities.
Grid technology uses spare capacity on computer networks to run
complex applications. IBM plans to offer this spare capacity in its
own datacentres, allowing businesses to buy computing processing
power as and when they require it.
Warwick University, assisted by a £2m donation from IBM, is one of
the sites researching how this kind of supercomputing power can be
created from a network of less powerful computers.
The university has been given an S/390 mainframe and software to
help create development tools for the grid. Using IBM's VM
operating system technology, Warwick is able to run hundreds of
virtual Linux machines within the single mainframe box housed at
Warwick.
In theory, the S/390 is capable of running up to 90,000 instances
of Linux - "almost as much as anyone could need," commented James
Turner, a Phd student studying Grid Computing at Warwick. The
research is looking at the resource management issues raised when
hundreds of machines are connected on this supercomputing grid.
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James Turner talks to CW360 about Grid
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