United Devices: Support For Open Grid Services Architecture

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, June 3, 2002

United Devices has announced support for the new Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) standards specification effort. The OGSA represents a Grid system architecture based on an integration of Web services standards, such as XML, WSDL, and SOAP, in addition to Grid standards that locate, schedule and secure computing resources developed by the Globus (www.globus.org ) project.

"The OGSA will make it possible to develop and integrate applications for Grid computing that move beyond the scientific and technical community to the world of business applications," said Jack Dongarra, University Distinguished Professor at the University of Tennessee. "United Devices' proven expertise in deploying large-scale PC grids is a tremendous asset to the Grid standards' effort."

United Devices is a corporate sponsor of the Global Grid Forum (GGF, www.gridforum.org ), an international forum where the OGSA and other Grid and peer-to-peer related standards are being developed. United Devices actively participates in several emerging working groups within the GGF that are especially relevant to PC grids. United Devices brings particular expertise in PC grid computing with enterprise deployments at life science companies, including Novartis, in addition to successful Internet projects for cancer and anthrax toxin research.

"We believe the work of the GGF is vitally important to the adoption of grids in the business world," said Jikku Venkat, vice president of engineering for United Devices. "We're pleased to play an integral role in shaping the future of the Grid for commercial purposes."

By leveraging assets they already own, enterprises can expand the scope of research, accelerate the delivery of results to market, and drive product quality while controlling or even reducing computing budgets. In most large corporations, the computing power represented by the networked PCs far exceeds the power of traditional high-performance computing assets in the data center.