SAS says it has become the first enterprise business intelligence vendor to join the Global Grid Forum (GGF), an industry association formed to advance grid computing.
The GGF is a community-initiated forum of more than 5 000 researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or "grid" technologies. GGF aims to support the development and deployment of grid technologies by creating and documenting technical specifications and implementation guidelines, among other things.
Grid computing began as an academic research tool and is seen as the natural next stage for the Internet. Worldwide grid spending is expected to soar from $250 million in 2003 to $4.89 billion in 2008.
"We currently have customers from a variety of industries that are using SAS technology in a grid environment to reduce total elapsed execution time on a project by as much as 99%," says Keith Collins, SAS's senior VP and chief technology officer.
"SAS's large-scale parallel processing capabilities are integral in furthering the development of grid computing. Our involvement in the GGF will enable us to exchange knowledge and information with industry leaders in order to advance our current grid capabilities, as well as to help shape the grid computing industry in general."
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