Medical Device Link.

WEB WATCH

EMDM Internet Issue: This special, expanded Web Watch contains a series of news stories on the latest developments in Internet technology.

Engineers will benefit from next-generation Internet

IBM announced on 2 August that it had been selected by the British government to link a massive network of computers throughout the United Kingdom. The mammoth computer grid will dwarf the power of the Internet and is expected to benefit scientists who seek to share enormous amounts of data for collaborative projects. Such a network could also have significant implications for the private sector.

Just as electricity is delivered to homes over an electrical grid, computing grids allow geographically distributed organizations to share applications, data, and computing resources. Described by IBM as a "new model of computing," grids are clusters of servers joined together over the Internet, using open-source technologies such as Globus and Linux.

The British government, through the Office of Science and Technology, is building its national grid to support scientific research in a variety of disciplines. The grid will also serve as a testbed for deploying "e-utility computing," or "e-sourcing"—the delivery of computing resources, including bandwidth, applications, and storage, as a utility over the Internet. The UK national grid centre is located in Edinburgh, and there will be eight regional centres located at the universities of Oxford, Newcastle, Belfast, Manchester, Cardiff, Cambridge, and Southampton, and at Imperial College, London.

Although the initial uses of the grid will be in the public sector, IBM points out that it is eager to move the grid into the commercial mainstream. "We do not see commercial uses of the grid as being way off in the future," says Irving Wladawski-Berger, head of IBM's Internet division. He adds that the company is already working with potential clients in the life sciences and engineering sectors.

IBM predicts that grids—like the Internet itself—are poised to grow beyond the academic world and become an important business platform. Grid protocols could provide a key platform for e-sourcing, or the sale and delivery of computing resources as a utility-like service over the Internet. IBM e-Utility Labs in the United States are now using grids to develop and test e-sourcing services, and IBM reports that it is already working with a number of customers to enable e-sourcing in commercial grid environments.

Grid protocols could allow companies to work more closely and more efficiently with colleagues, partners, and suppliers in three key areas:

Resource aggregation, which would allow corporate users to treat a company's entire IT infrastructure as one computer through more-efficient management.

Collaboration, which would allow widely dispersed organizations to work together on a project, sharing everything from engineering blueprints to software applications.

Database sharing, which would allow companies to access remote databases.

Engineering is another application that is expected to benefit significantly. IBM has already won a tender to build a sophisticated data storage facility at Oxford University, which will be the primary UK source of high-energy physics data generated by a leading experiment at Fermilab in Batavia, IL, USA. This is one of several major high-energy physics projects that are planning to make use of the grid, such as the new Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Also, using the national grid, scientists at Cambridge will be able to run sophisticated high-energy physics applications on computers in Belfast.

"I am delighted that IBM is collaborating with the UK to build the next-generation Globus-based grid middleware, which will have implications far beyond the original scientific applications," says Tony Hey, architect of the UK national grid. David Turek, IBM's vice president of emerging technologies, adds, "IBM is proud to be an integral part of the national grid project—a bold next step in the evolution of the Internet."

Benjamin Lichtman

Copyright ©2001 European Medical Device Manufacturer