HP touts ChinaGrid work

Computerworld - Hewlett-Packard Co. said today that it is supporting ChinaGrid, one of the world’s largest grid computing implementations.

The grid initiative by the Chinese government is designed to extend IT resources and services to thousands of researchers and the more than 290 million students in the country’s university system, HP said.

Grid computing involves pooling the power of sometimes hundreds or thousands of servers over a network to run programs more reliably and reduce the cost of maintaining data centers.

HP said it is the primary technology infrastructure provider for ChinaGrid, which runs under the direction of the China Ministry of Education. The project aims to securely share a loosely coupled infrastructure and services within and across geographic and organizational boundaries.

“HP Labs has been working closely with the ChinaGrid team to develop one of the world’s most advanced grid monitoring systems,” Hai Jin, chief scientist of ChinaGrid and a professor and dean of the School of Computer Science and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, said in a statement.

A team of researchers from the new HP Labs in Beijing and from various Chinese universities is currently developing monitoring, measurement, security and visualization mechanisms for ChinaGrid, according to HP. The team recently completed an advanced display wall and visualization system that showcases the ChinaGrid monitoring system, the company said. When completed, the system will be known as the ChinaGrid National Monitoring Center.

“HP is a leader in grid technologies and continues to invest in research-and-development efforts to advance grid, where application services execute on shared IT resources,” Meichun Hsu, director of HP Labs China, said in a statement. “We are proud to play an important role in a collaborative and secure grid computing environment for this visionary undertaking by the Ministry of Education.”

HP Labs researchers also are working on software agents that can be plugged into the grid system to bolster security. The team is developing an active feedback system as a service using a system based on HP OpenView Radia software and service-oriented architecture.