Grid bundles seem to be the favored approach. IBM, for example, announced in November that it will deploy the Globus Toolkit on its Linux and AIX servers. Platform announced around the same time that Compaq will package Platform’s Grid Suite software on its Tru64 Unix servers and its Linux servers. And in 2000, Sun Microsystems released Sun Grid Engine, free software that helps companies set up "cluster grids," or grids that live in a single location. In November 2001, Sun announced the no-cost beta release of Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition, which it will eventually sell to help companies build "campus grids" that link computer resources in several departments or locales.

Meanwhile, some vendors are striving for a utility model of grid computing. IBM announced in August that it plans to let companies?sometime in 2002?buy processing power instead of building their own grids. Though Dave Turek, vice president of emerging technologies for IBM, declined to describe the exact configuration of such a utility, he indicated at the time of the announcement that customers might tap into processing power at 50 IBM data centers around the globe. Meanwhile, HP is rolling out a service model called Utility Data Center, which it claims will be able to run enterprise and Web apps, such as those used by online retailers, as opposed to the more traditional grid computing tasks. Nick Gall, an analyst with the Meta Group based in Stamford, Conn., says HP’s plan is ambitious. "They’re trying to address many of the key challenges of grid computing in a very short time frame. There’s a significant chance they’re setting expectations too high," he says.

The Future

Before grid computing moves into the commercial mainstream, CIOs need to learn more about the technology and its possibilities, and identify ways they can use it. But proponents claim that just about any sophisticated company can find a need for high-volume number crunching. For example, says Gall, companies that engage in weather forecasting, such as insurance companies and commodities futures brokerages, have supercomputing needs that grids can address. Similarly, financial services companies could use grid computing at the end of each day to make sure their portfolios are balanced with the appropriate risk. "How much would it have been worth to [defunct investment house] Barings to have been able to analyze its entire portfolio and find out what one rogue trader was doing?" says Peter Jeffcock, Sun’s group marketing manager for software products in the technical market products group, based in Palo Alto, Calif. "A grid could have helped because this is a huge, compute-intensive task." Jeffcock adds that grid computing can help any company that does its own software development and testing. "You’re running weekly, nightly and sometimes daily regression tests. If you could run them over lunch and say, ’Here’s what you need to fix in the afternoon,’ you could deploy the products much quicker."