Rolls-Royce and BAe are among the first UK companies bravely dipping a toe into enterprise grid computing.

While commercial grid computing still needs to work on standards, security and billing issues, it can now be used within large organisations to optimise disparate resources from around the world, according to Professor Simon Cox of Southampton University.

Intel recently launched the Virtual European Grid Centre in conjunction with the University of Southampton and Imperial College, London. The centre aims to speed up the widespread adoption of grid computing.

Its Geodise project aims to develop a robust enterprise model in three years. "We have already demonstrated some functions, and we hope to have some working functions in about twelve months' time," said Cox.

Turning web services into grid services

He explained that the project found a way to get around the lack of a standard for the Globus grid protocol. It uses web services, which have well defined standards, and adds additional code to turn them into grid services.

Geodise partners work in co-operation with standards body the Globus Grid Forum to ensure that the additional code will not differ significantly from the future Globus standard. With this de facto standard in place, Geodise partners can focus on other commercial grid issues, such as security.

"Security is important for enterprises. BAe and Rolls-Royce are immensely concerned about running code externally. They want to make absolutely certain that confidential codes cannot leak out," Cox explained.

"But BAe and Rolls-Royce can already use grid applications securely within their intranets. For large enterprises it makes sense to use internal grid models, as it enables better use of computing power across the world."

Rolls-Royce said that it is eagerly following the project's development and that it is keen to become an end-user. "The enormous computing power of the Geodise system would help us solve complex technical problems, particularly in the area of computational fluid dynamics," said a spokesman.

Intel provides the building blocks for the Virtual Centre and staff resources to help grid research at the University of Southampton and Imperial College. It will also provide software libraries and tools which have emerged from its own internal grid use.

Grid-in-a-box

Existing grid collaboration projects with the two university sites include 'George' engineering and design, 'Genie' earth system modelling and the 'Oscar' distributed resources grid-in-a-box project.

Joerg Finger, director of marketing programmes at Intel, argued that his company has saved hundreds of millions of dollars using an intranet grid called NetBatch, which is used for chip design and development.

He explained that web services, grid computing and peer-to-peer applications shared common needs such as internet connectivity, security and directories, so it was sensible to bring them together. "To make this work we need industry-wide standards. A generalised grid infrastructure is the key to success," he said.

Additional reporting by Peter Williams.