Wednesday, May 21, 2003

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eWeek Gateway Grid Used in Diabetes Research

" The American Diabetes Association is using Gateway Inc.'s grid program to run a compute-intensive application designed to accelerate diabetes-related research.

The association, based in Alexandria, Va., is running the Archimedes software application, which Richard Kahn, chief scientific and medical officer for the ADA, called "the Sims City of health care." Using the program, the association can create an environment with any number of variables--such as doctors, hospitals, rooms, costs, patients and treatments--and run numerous what-if scenarios as a way of researching multiple aspects of diabetes care and running clinical studies."

redux [12.10.02]
eWeek Gateway Gears Up Grid Computing Push

"Gateway Inc., the PC maker best known for its consumer systems and talking cow, is linking thousands of display PCs in its nationwide chain of stores to create a grid computing environment capable of scaling to 14 teraflops of performance."

In a pilot test, Inpharmatica Ltd. reproduced the results of a bioinformatics job run on the Processing on Demand system and its own computer farm, said CIO Pat Leach. The London-based company turned to Gateway because it wants to cut the amount of time it spends managing its 2,300-processor computer farm. "We are a drug discovery company, not an IT shop," Leach said. "We would much rather employ people to do innovative analysis of the data than spend time building computers.""

redux [01.09.03]
Bio-IT World Grids: When Concepts Collide

"Clearly, grid computing means different things to different people, often at different times. To its most visionary pundits, grids symbolize the penultimate step in the evolution of computing architecture into a universal source of pervasive, utility-like computing power that companies can purchase as needed, much as they purchase electricity today. Most stalwart advocates believe that grids not only represent the IT environment of the future but also will ultimately eclipse in significance what the Internet is today."

"All hype aside, it is unlikely that grids will fundamentally change the way that scientific and technical computing is done in the near term, particularly in the private sector."

redux [09.13.02]
Genomeweb Pharma Eases onto the Grid, but Desktop Deals Highlight Remaining Obstacles

"A final obstacle that Stuart pointed out is of the self-inflicted variety: Grid, distributed, peer-to-peer, and other similar incarnations have become victims of their own hype. Increasing media coverage of these technologies has led to confusion in the marketplace, Stuart posited, "and when a prospect becomes confused, the easiest thing is not to do anything.""

"However, he added, there is a bright side to the publicity deluge. Citing the Gartner Group's annual "Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies" report, which tracks new methods from the initial "tech trigger" period through the "peak of inflated expectations," the "trough of disillusionment," the "slope of enlightenment," and onto the final "plateau of productivity," Stuart noted that desktop grid computing might be working its way from the trough to the slope phase right now, largely because users are discovering which applications work best with the architecture."