Vendors develop distributed resource spec

Computer hardware and software manufacturers have formed a group dedicated to creating a specification that will make it easier to share distributed computing resources.

The New Productivity Initiative (NPI) includes server manufacturers such as Compaq and Hewlett Packard, and software vendors such as Platform Computing.

The group, which said it welcomes additional members, will work towards developing a reference model and a layered set of open APIs (application programming interfaces) for distributed resource management (DRM).

DRM technology ensures the effective management of distributed computing resources across a network or the internet, including computers, clusters, software and data storage, to enable higher levels of user productivity.

The technology is currently used by service providers to manage customers' extensive computing resources and by manufacturers to run heavy number-crunching across networks of commodity computers instead of traditional supercomputers.

Examples of the technology range from the project to map the human genome to the Seti@home project, which used the spare processing capacity thousands of ordinary PCs over the internet to find search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Using DRM, it is hoped that the internet will be transformed into a computing grid, enabling transparent access to all computing resources around the world.

Just as standards such as TCP/IP and HTML drove wide spread adoption of the internet, NPI believes that DRM standards, which will enable interoperability, are required to create a ubiquitous grid of computing resources.