A team of College of Computing researchers, jointly with colleagues at Ohio State University, have received a new IBM Shared University Research (SUR) award to create a Critical Enterprise Grid Services (CEGS) facility, a prototype corporate grid that will link the two institutions.

"This award is unique in that it will permit us to experiment in a dedicated setting with the highly distributed enterprise systems and applications that now pervade industrial settings," Said Karsten Schwan, College of Computing Professor and Director of the Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS).

Schwan, along with College of Computing Professor Calton Pu, Associate Professor Ling Liu, and Research Scientists Greg Eisenhauer and Matthew Wolf, will collaborate with faculty from Ohio State University on the project titled "Critical Enterprise Grid Services (CEGS) - Managing Critical Enterprise Applications on Distributed Service-Oriented Architectures."

The IBM SUR award will permit Georgia Tech and Ohio State researchers to develop and experiment with autonomic methods for managing distributed applications that provide services critical to the function of an organization. The CEGS grid will not only be a research facility, but it will itself provide IT services to the educational enterprise of these two primary institutions and in addition, to secondary Atlanta- and Columbus-area institutions addressed by educational and industry outreach efforts.

According to the project abstract, the CEGS grid will go beyond being an exciting research facility, to become a test bed for modern management tools and make it a visible artifact for interactions with industry technology users and developers in these regions and nationally.