among them until it just kept cropping up in my research.

Back at IBM many years back (early 1990s), was involved in discussions on a range of software that was being developed on RS/6000s and used in IBM labs & research institutes to share spare horsepower on their workstations. It was intended for deployment on heterogeneous computers on a common Lan (& later Wans as well).

Back then, the move to introduce it to IBM labs was resisted at first but then increasingly picked up when the scientists involved found they were getting large computational jobs done faster than just using their own workstations & booking time at the research centers super computer.

At the time there was a work being done on parallel compilers & parallel job scheduling, I seem to recall a project Linda being part of this. I was also involved in demonstrating an IBM Unix like environment orginally developed at CMU (I think) that shared file & compute resources across multiple brands of computers (Mainframes, Minis, RISC WS & Intel PCs). I was also involved in tradeshow demos of DCE along with people from HP, Bull & DEC. Some of this stuff seemed to be very early 'GRID'-like computing.

IBM had a name for their RS/6000 project but I just can't recall it. In looking at what GRID computing is now about, it seems that maybe that early work has reached a level of maturity and industry acceptance such that we in user-land can start taking notice, perhaps even begin experiments with it.

Because we are doing some innovative stuff with web services where I now work, and was preparing some info sessions, I became aware of a broader mention to the recent references to GRID computing. They speak of a tight coupling with Web Services, in fact while posting the 1st post above I came across the OGSA & that Architecture seems to state as fact, the relationship between Web Services & GRID computing.

It leads me to believe that GRID might be becoming real & if that is so, it is a technology to track & delve into.

Doug Marker

Found this link that looks like the stuff IBM was doing back in 90s

[link|http://www.ualberta.ca/CNS/hyperdispatch/HyperDispatch6/lab.htm|http://www.ualberta....Dispatch6/lab.htm]