Chinese Gridwork

8:45 PM -- Could China be the place where the U.S looks for its storage and server know-how during the coming years? Quite possibly, if current trends are anything to go by. (See Sepaton Claims 150 New Customers , Intel Expands R&D in China , Netli Gets $18M, Wins SAP Deal, Brocade Expands China Ops, and AT&T to Host Shanghai.)

Today, HP became the latest U.S. technology giant to look east, with the announcement of a major grid project for Chinese students and universities. Designed to support bioinformatics and imaging research, HP's ChinaGrid, however, is notable for its sheer scale. Sure, there are some grid projects underway in the U.S, but ChinaGrid is designed to support 290 million students, almost as many people as the entire U.S population. (See JP Morgan Goes Grid and TeraGrid Receives $150M Award.)

Could this help iron out some of the kinks in the grid concept? I certainly hope so. Grid computing, as we know, is not without its problems, whether it be a limited number of applications, lack of standards and skills, or software licensing headaches. (See Girding for Grid, Grid Computing: Baby Steps, and Software Licensing Gridlock.)

China, with its seemingly limitless resources, might just be the place where these issues can be thrashed out. Apparently the Chinese Ministry of Education, which is building the ChinaGrid with HP, will be using the Oasis consortium's WSDM Web services standard, so, hopefully, some of this expertise will filter back across the Pacific.

-- James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: