Monday's launch of the Globus Consortium by HP, Intel, IBM and Sun Microsystems represented the second body devoted to the commercialization of grid to come into being in the past year, after the Enterprise Grid Alliance launched in April.

Why do we need yet another grid outfit? Besides the EGA, we already have the Globus Alliance, as well as a smattering of bodies that work on grid standards, including the Global Grid Forum, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and the World Wide Web Consortium.

The Globus Consortium, however, is specifically devoted to advancing open-source implementation of grid standards as the world of grid opens up to commercial use. The group is focused on advancing the Globus Toolkit, an open standards building block for enterprise-level grid implementations that came out of the Globus Alliance, an open-source-focused organization at Argonne National Labs.

Ian Foster, a consortium board member who led the original team that developed the tool kit, compares Globus Consortium to the Open Source Development Labs in which Linus Torvalds works, where the goal is to take Linux and make it ready for enterprise use.

Grid computing, of course, has been around for years. But with the launch of products such as Oracle's Database 10g, interest in using it in nonacademic settings has escalated. After all, as Peter ffoulkes, Sun's director of marketing for high-performance and technical computing, said to me recently, business computing has woken up.
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Source : YahooNews