MIDDLEWARE

NEC Corporation today announced that it has succeeded in the development of GRID middleware, which enables autonomous resource allocation of services in response to dynamic changes in service workloads. The middleware mainly focuses on commercial enterprise IT systems (e.g. data centers) consisting of several resources, such as servers, networks and services. Achieving efficient utilization of all IT resources, and a reduction in system operation costs, the GRID Middleware was enabled by the development of the following new technologies: 1) Policy-Based Unified Resource Management Technology Policy refers to the collection of rules describing how to control resources according to monitored results. The middleware achieves coordination of policies developed for IT/Network resources and services in order to automatically decide optimal resource utilization of the entire system intermittently. 2) IT/Network Resource Virtualization Technology This capability allows system administrators to describe high-level policies for system reconfiguration, such as addition or removal of servers to/from the system, instead of sequence, low-level specific operations for individual IT/Network hardware. "The development of this innovative GRID Middleware technology is another important step for NEC toward the realization of GRID computing" said Hiroshi Katayama, General Manager of NEC Internet Systems Research Laboratories. "NEC hopes GRID computing will contribute to a variety of fields in the future, such as application simulation in the medical field through acceleration of calculation speeds, and reduction of enterprise business costs through optimal allocation of resources." NEC plans to incorporate the newly developed GRID middleware into NEC's VALUMO product series combined with the results of the Business Grid Computing Project that NEC is participating in, which is led by METI(Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry). The result of this research was announced at the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2004), which was held from July 6-9, 2004, in San Diego, U.S.A.