Chicago plays host next week to computer whizzes from throughout the world who are intent upon moving the Internet to its next phase-grid computing.

Grids are networks for computations-the kind of number-crunching used by scientists and, increasingly, big business. The goal is to add a new dimension to the Internet so that its computing power can become as free-flowing as electricity.

Chicago is a particularly fitting site for the meeting of the Global Grid Forum, to be held Oct. 15-17, because the Windy City is home to the brains and the high-speed optical networks driving the grid-computing revolution.

Ian Foster, a native New Zealander and open-source computing proponent who has gained fame as the father of grid computing, is a computer science professor at the University of Chicago and associate director of the mathematics and computer science division at Argonne National Laboratory.

Foster, 43, is featured in the October issue of Red Herring magazine, in which he predicts today's mini-grids will grow into a global grid that will process complex tasks ranging from modeling new pharmaceuticals to discovering how galaxies cluster in the sky.

The grid's growth, similar to that of the Internet, will give users at far-flung terminals access to super-computer-grade power now available to only a few researchers at chosen facilities.

"Often, the scientific community is the first to adopt the technology, but it's increasingly clear it is important to what people need to accomplish in industry as well," Foster said in an interview.

Though issues such as a common language, network security and resource-sharing need to be worked out before grid computing expands, companies such as Boeing, Motorola and Ford Motor are already using mini-grids.

An operating system that will prove key to enabling the global grid is called The Globus ToolKit, the result of a project led by Foster and Carl Kesselman, director of the Center for Grid Technologies at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.

Another key player in the grid computing movement is Charlie Catlett, chairman of the Global Grid Forum and a senior fellow at Argonne.

Catlett is executive director of TeraGrid, a National Science Foundation-funded project to create a highly innovative, multi-site supercomputing system with ultra-high speed networks.

TeraGrid provides links among Argonne, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana's National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of San Diego's Supercomputing Center, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Catlett also recently completed I-Wire, a dark-fiber network that links a dozen sites in downtown Chicago with Argonne and the U. of I. at Champaign-Urbana. I-Wire, which has a capacity of 60 times today's fastest network, will provide a network for the TeraGrid.

Catlett said in an interview that the Global Grid Forum is much more than developing a common language or technology standard for the grid. It will pave the way for companies to collaborate in a supportive way, he said.
A Chicago company will use its software and support services to help scientists who gather at next week's meeting communicate with their colleagues in other cities via a high-tech kind of videoconferencing similar to Star Trek's holodecks.

The company, inSORS, co-founded by former Michael Galich and Chicago Mercantile Exchange market-maker Kevin Gleason, will set up two rooms at the U. of C's Gleacher Center, where vivid images of grid computing participants from remote sites will be "beamed" onto the walls with lifelike accuracy and audio quality.

The so-called Access Grid technology is an application used in conjunction with the grid network.
The folks at inSORS support the Global Grid Forum because it is based on open-source standards, meaning the grid operates with all sorts of software and hardware, regardless of their manufacturer.

Even the notoriously proprietary Microsoft Corp. has hopped onto the grid bandwagon, though its vision of the grid's use differs from that of rival IBM Corp.

That's because the grid is increasingly aligned with Web services, which will enable companies to eventually offer and pay for services ranging from disaster recovery, data on demand and computing on demand.