IBM Announces Grid Computing Project At EPA

International Business Machines announced Sept. 17 six new Grid computing projects, including one at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that follows a pilot Grid program to help the EPA and state agencies improve air quality modeling and better predict the environmental risks of air pollution exposure.

In addition to EPA, IBM announced five commercial Grid projects, including Siemens mobile, NTT Com, and Sinopec, as well as ten new application software companies that have readied their products for Grid computing.

The IBM project at EPA, being performed jointly with prime contractor Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), includes the Grid Toolbox, a collection of open standards-based Grid software from IBM, Red Hat Linux Enterprise 2.1 and Avaki Enterprise Information Integration (EII) software.

The agency is currently evaluating plans to expand the project to a production environment using IBM eServer pSeries supercomputers. EPA is also investigating the opportunity to offer Grid capabilities as a service offering.