New Standards For Grids
Grids
seem to confuse people. I’m
often told by vendors – or press people who don’t cover the
sector – that grids are strictly for numerically intense science
projects – supercomputing projects like predicting the weather or
solving problems in the human genome.
Others
are absolutely certain that:
(1)
There are already lots of grids up and running;
(2)
Some of them are already being used for business applications; and
(3)
We’re going to see lots more grids in the months and years to come.
We
know the latter view is true, because we’ve been interviewing some
of those business users, finding applications like portfolio
analysis for a large bank’s investment department and drug
research for pharmaceutical companies.
Numerically intense? Sure.
Science projects? No.
Just business problems that have become much more solvable at
much lower price points.
This
week, IBM used the GlobusWorld conferred to announce a new Web
Services specification to converge Grid and Web services standards.
They were joined by their co-authors Akamai, The Globus Alliance, HP, Sonic
Software and TIBCO
The
new specification is intended to ease the development and deployment
of Web Services.
The new
WS-Notification and WS-Resource Framework represent the first time a
common, standards-based infrastructure will be available for
business applications, Grid resources and systems management. These
new specifications will help customers lower costs, speed deployment
and enable integration across and outside of the enterprise.
These new Web services specifications will extend the types of
enterprise solutions customers can easily deploy and provide
customers with the ability to utilize a common Web services based
infrastructure to support both Grid and management based solutions.
The new approach is
hoped to support the flexibility needs of on demand business
environments with a very flexible application and integration
environment that can support real time change.
The WS-Notification specification and its Resource Framework
will permit organizations to model their stateful resources (such as
servers) and their logical constructs (such as business agreements,
contracts, and policies).
It can be used to automatically notify participants of
actions taken or needed to be taken, including the ability to
solicit multiple potential actors and to select among them.
It also includes the ability to terminate resources based on
deadlines.
These specifications provide customers with the ability to share
infrastructure across emerging business applications, systems
management and grid computing.
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