Originally published on 04/15/2002

I put a lot of miles on my car last week, shuttling between InfoWorld's CTO Forum in San Francisco and IBM's Almaden Institute autonomic computing symposium, held near San Jose. I didn't think these two events were going to have any relation to each other; the practical needs of a chief technology officer are years different from the stuff bouncing around IBM's labs. However, there was a strong conceptual link between the issues being discussed at the CTO forum and the future technologies at Almaden.

At the CTO Forum, an important focus was Web services. A Web service is a somewhat-abstracted application: one program calls on another to do a service, not knowing where the other is or how it works.

At IBM, the focus was on grid computing, a further level of abstraction in which programs (such as Web services) are written to consume raw computing resources running on a grid analogous to the power grid that we plug our toasters into.

Now, when you have applications using abstracted services, and those services are using indeterminate computing resources, you have a pretty serious system management challenge, which leads to the concept of self-healing "autonomic" systems, the focus of an IBM research initiative that the symposium covered.

The companies to profit from autonomic computing, in the long term, will likely be the platform vendors: IBM, Sun, Cisco, etc. However, if Web services begin to consume grid computing resources, a whole new kind of data center will emerge, as well as feeder companies to support these systems.

The notion of businesses consuming processor cycles from a grid, as they do electricity, is pretty odd; computing is nothing like a utility, at least not yet. Yet for many compute-intensive applications -- such as biological and financial simulations, and the rendering of animated films -- the concept is attractive and worth exploring, especially as bandwidth gets cheaper and the software to handle compute cycles as commodities evolves.

- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com

• IBM's autonomic computing manifesto
• HP Labs: Internet systems and storage
• Sun's Grid Engine
• InfoWorld's CTO Forum
• The Globus Project (grid computing)
• The New Productivity Initiative (distributed resource management)
• Sychron (grid computing)
• Intelliden (grid computing)
• Inkra Networks (grid computing)
• Avaki (grid computing)
• Entropia (distributed computing)
• Ejasent (grid computing)

• HP makes play for utility computing (InfoWorld)
• Data Central: Advanced data centers will redirect innovation toward new technologies for truly distributed computing. (Red Herring)
• Sun imagines world of virtual servers (News.com)
• Energy Dept., IBM to unveil Science Grid (News.com)
• Petroleum companies tap IT to help sustain them through a tough economy (InformationWeek)
• Seti: Is Anybody Out There? (Wired)
• Anti-Anthrax Screensaver Reaches Goal (InformationWeek)