Stories about: United Devices

Platform Computing this week is rolling out LSF 7.0, an update to its grid software that makes it easier for organizations to manage and share resources across a single grid, the company says.

Mention the word "grid" and most IT executives probably think of thousands of CPUs crunching numbers for data-intensive applications such as seismic modeling and drug discovery. Increasingly, however, grids are being considered as platforms for creating more flexible, efficient data center architectures.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) Tuesday introduced several new utility computing services that will cater to IT managers looking for a way to handle internal fluctuations in demand for computing resources.

Last year both end users and vendors touted grid computing as the new paradigm in flexible, efficient computing. But will 2005 see widespread adoption of the technology? Rodney Gedda reports

Deploying a grid infrastructure can help companies dramatically improve hardware utilization rates and boost computing power. But the massive resource aggregation and wider end-user access enabled by grids also have the potential to magnify security risks, implementers say.

Hoping to harness a few million of the personal computers are not already running the SETI@home screen saver, IBM and United Devices on Tuesday launched a new World Community Grid project designed to act as a clearing house for humanitarian computing projects.

When Novartis AG needed extra processing power, the pharmaceutical giant found it -- 5 trillion floating-point operations per second of unused capacity, to be precise -- in 2,700 desktop PCs at its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland. The company lashed the PCs together in a compute grid that it now uses to run number-crunching supercomputer applications that model the interactions between proteins and other chemicals that might be used in drugs.

Trying to further fuel its momentum in the grid computing market, IBM Corp. on Wednesday rolled out two new offerings aimed at the banking and financial markets and announced a handful of new grid projects among both commercial and scientific institutions.

A massive grid computing network is being created to use the idle computing cycles in millions of computers around the world to find a cure for smallpox.

IBM Corp. along with two partners announced on Wednesday a global research effort that will focus on developing new drugs to combat the smallpox virus post infection. The project will employ a huge computing grid designed to let up to 2 million users contribute their idle computing resources to the effort.

United Devices Inc. CEO Ed Hubbard gets his back up a bit at the suggestion that the grid computing market has yet to lose the training wheels.