Dear All,

I hope all of you have enjoyed new year holidays and getting back to work.
I have also enjoyed my visit to India and Singapore. I am thrilled to share
some Grid news and recent updates to our
Grid Information Centre - http://www.gridcomputing.com/
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1. Grid Industry is Growing: During my recent trip to India in Dec and Jan,
I have visited a number of research and commercial organisations who are
interested or started working in Grid computing area. I was really thrilled
to know that many SMEs and large orgnisations such as Infosys have started
active programs in Grid computing. For instance, I was told that Infosys is
looking to hire over 60 engineers or developers in Grid computing area right
now, but they are unable to find them. This is really a great news for
people like us working in this area.

2. I have updated GridFAQ section:
http://www.gridcomputing.com/gridfaq.html

3. I have added links to upcoming Grid Conferences:
- Grid 2004: http://www.gridbus.org/grid2004/
- P2P 2004 : http://femto.org/p2p2004/
- GCC 2004 : http://grid.hust.edu.cn/gcc2004
- Global Grid Forum (GGF-10) - http://www.ggf.org/

4. A Technical Report on .NET-based Grid Computing Framework
As you know, as part of the
The Global Data-Intensive Grid Collaboration
the Gridbus Project has demonstrated creation of a World-largest
that integrates both Windows-based and Unix-based Grid resources.
One of the Grid technologies that played a leading in making this
happen are our Grid Service Broker and .NET-based Grid framework (Alchemi)
developed by the Gridbus Project.
A technical report describing this new Grid system and how this has
been achieved has been released. A short abstract on this is given below.
You will be able download full report from the Gridbus Project Website:
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~raj/papers/Alchemi.pdf
We will soon be releasing a stable version of Alchemi [stay tuned].
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Wish you all the best.

cheers
Raj

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Title: Alchemi: A .NET-based Grid Computing Framework and its Integration into
Global Grids
Authors: Akshay Luther, Rajkumar Buyya, Rajiv Ranjan, and Srikumar Venugopal
Comments: 17 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables
Report-no: GRIDS-TR-2003-8
Subj-class: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
ACM-class: C.2.4
Journal-ref: Technical Report, GRIDS-TR-2003-8, Grid Computing and Distributed
Systems Laboratory, University of Melbourne, Australia, December 2003
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Computational grids that couple geographically distributed resources are
becoming the de-facto computing platform for solving large-scale problems in
science, engineering, and commerce. Software to enable grid computing has been
primarily written for Unix-class operating systems, thus severely limiting the
ability to effectively utilize the computing resources of the vast majority of
desktop computers i.e. those running variants of the Microsoft Windows
operating system. Addressing Windows-based grid computing is particularly
important from the software industry's viewpoint where interest in grids is
emerging rapidly. Microsoft's .NET Framework has become near-ubiquitous for
implementing commercial distributed systems for Windows-based platforms,
positioning it as the ideal platform for grid computing in this context. In
this paper we present Alchemi, a .NET-based grid computing framework that
provides the runtime machinery and programming environment required to
construct desktop grids and develop grid applications. It allows flexible
application composition by supporting an object-oriented grid application
programming model in addition to a grid job model. Cross-platform support is
provided via a web services interface and a flexible execution model supports
dedicated and non-dedicated (voluntary) execution by grid nodes.
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Full paper: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~raj/papers/Alchemi.pdf
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