UK science centre ushers in the age of the grid

Chancellor Gordon Brown today opened the first National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh aimed at developing grid computing projects for the benefit of science and business.

Large corporations have become increasingly interested in this method of computing, which allows virtual collaboration and the sharing of computing resources, because of its potential role in accelerating web services.

The irony is that the biggest jointly-funded projects under development at the British centre are in fact with US companies IBM, Oracle and Sun.

A £3.5m project is already underway with IBM and Oracle to develop ways of linking databases into the grid.

However, Mark Parsons, commercial director of the e-Science Centre, said these types of joint venture represent a "double-edged sword" for the academic world. Parsons is concerned the private sector could hijack grid computing for its own financial gain, in a replication of what happened with the internet.

This is why, Parsons argued, scientific institutions must play an integral role in the development of such projects.

"Business could learn a thing or two about collaboration and grid computing from a project that has been running in Switzerland," he said. "Around 6,000 scientists from around the world are working in virtual collaboration to determine the origins of the Universe."

A huge computer nestled in a 26km long tunnel underneath Geneva is processing data of up to ten peta-bytes (one billion megabytes) at a time. Parsons told silicon.com: "If grid computing can handle this quantity of data it can deal with anything business can throw at it."

The most famous deployment of the grid model of computing is SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence).