Design of a grid computing infrastructure based on mainframes

Abstract

Businesses are entering the next phase of e-Business, in which they need to be able to sense and respond to fluctuating market conditions in real time. IBM is leading the way toward this on-demand world and a number of initiatives are underway to investigate, design and deploy Grid technologies, which form one of the pillars upon which the on-demand environment can be built. Integral part of these efforts is the integration of existing mainframe resources in various data centers within a Grid environment. In this paper, we present a design that enables the sharing of underutilized capabilities of mainframes in a dynamic way. This approach promises to increase corporate efficiency, by improving return of investment (ROI) on data center investments and opens up the use of data center resources to new applications. An early prototype of the design has already been implemented, and a number of business and engineering applications are being tested on the prototype. © Springer-Verlag 2004.