IBM's "Extreme Blue" summer interns, described by the company as "the
best and brightest computer science students," will be asked to build
the next generation of Grid services and applications using a new Grid
that connects IBM's internal research labs.
The interns, who will arrive at IBM next week, will be designing
software that is expected to be included in IBM's commercial Grid
offerings, the company said.
The students will be working on databases for sharing data in a Grid, a
video Grid for distribution of digital media content, and Web services
software to enable virtual communities to collaborate using Grid
technology, IBM said.
The students will test their projects on the IBM intragrid, a
geographically distributed supercomputer linking IBM research and
development labs in the United States, Israel, Switzerland, Japan and
England.
"Grid Computing is the hottest area in the computing industry today,"
said Stuart Feldman, IBM's vice president for Internet Technology. "This
is an exciting opportunity to have the next generation of talent working
on the next generation of computing. The Extreme Blue interns have an
opportunity to work side-by-side with some of the best researchers in
the world at IBM as we build Grid offerings that will help customers
appreciate the full value of the Internet as a computing platform."
The Video Grid technology will be based on IBM Content Manager to
realize the vision of large-scale dynamic media content delivery by
taking advantage of Web Services and Grid Computing.
The Database Management Software project will work on federated data
access for Grid computing based on IBM's DB2 database software and the
Open Grid Service Architecture developed by IBM and the Globus open
community. The new advanced database management capability is being
designed to allow an open, standards-based integration of computer,
storage, and data resources across Grids, IBM said.
The Next Generation Collaboration project will develop standard
interfaces to enable application developers to embed collaborative
capabilities into Web applications. This will make it easier for Lotus
products to be used for collaboration over Grids, IBM said.
The Extreme Blue internship program launched in 1999 combines business
and technical students to work with IBM's research labs, technical
professionals, and business leaders, the company said. IBM gives the
interns access to the most advanced tools and technology so that the
work they do can potentially impact IBM products and technologies, Big
Blue said.
More than 100 students participate in the program each summer. The
program includes 11 IBM labs worldwide, in Cambridge, Mass.; Austin,
Texas; Almaden, Calif.; Raleigh, N.C.; Bvblingen, Germany; Haifa Lab,
Israel; Hursley Lab, England; LaGaude, France; Uithoorn, Netherlands;
Zurich, Switzerland; and Bejing China. This summer's class is made up of
students from top universities around the world, including MIT, Harvard,
Cornell, Stamford, UCLA, Berkeley, Duke, and the University of Texas,
IBM said.