IBM, Harvard team to develop 'Crimson Grid'

Harvard University and IBM Corp. are developing a universitywide computing grid for student and faculty research, data sharing and collaboration in life sciences, engineering and applied sciences, they announced Wednesday.

The "Crimson Grid" will be based on OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture) and is expected to eventually be available to other universities in the region, said Robert Eades, IBM's worldwide executive for academic, government and health in the company's life sciences division. The grid also will be part of a Massachusetts biotechnology grid.

"I am just excited beyond words," said Joy Sircar, chief information officer and IT director at Harvard's Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His division is where the grid will start and then it will be expanded to the rest of the university and beyond. The grid is a milestone in Sircar's IT career and he said that it has the potential to be a transformative step in how science and engineering tools and technologies are developed because of Harvard's reach and importance in those fields.

Harvard and IBM will develop and pre-test tools and protocols for the grid. Harvard is receiving an IBM Shared University Research award as part of the initiative and will receive e-Server systems for a blade center that will power the grid. Harvard's Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences' IT group, along with IBM computer scientists, will implement and build the Grid Reference System Implementation, which is the grid's core development environment. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard University Information Systems will provide the network backbone service.

The reference implementation can then be shared with other universities, agencies or groups interested in developing a grid, but that perhaps lack the time or expertise to develop such a computing system, Eades said.

"The really key benefit (of the project) is going to be having an easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy grid reference implementation," he said. Often, customers will take such an implementation to develop a grid and then buy commercial products for use in the grid -- in the case of life sciences that could be relational database software, he said.

"A very, very early test (implementation) is already up and running," Sircar said. The grid will be "an evolving process" over the next 12 months or so, he said.

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