(Li) Within the framework of the Shared University Research Award Program (see box) the information technology company IBM is sponsoring hardware and software for ETH to the tune of 800,000 US dollars, around 1,04 million Swiss francs. In collaboration with IBM's Development Centre in Böblingen, Germany, the database group at ETH Zurich will be carrying out research on the scalability and automatic configuration of infrastructures for distributive application processes.

IT resources as demand requires

The peer-to-peer management processes necessary for decentralised processing are employed, for example, in on-demand computing, the use of IT resources as occasion demands. The database group around ETH Professor Hans-Jörg Schek (1) (middle of the picture) focuses primarily on power analyses and comparisons between grid, peer-to-peer and service architectures. The group of researchers uses OSIRIS (Open Service Infrastructure for Reliable and Integrated process Support), a research prototype they developed themselves (2). ETH will mostly employ the new hardware and software for hyperdatabase research.

Amongst the hardware sponsored by IBM there are four supercomputing machines, "eServer xSeries", an "eServer BladeCenter", a TotalStorage Server as well as eight ThinkPads T40. The latter are the equivalent of the laptops, which students were able to buy at special prices within the framework of co-operation agreement, signed in 2001, between IBM and ETH Zurich (Neptun-Project (3)). Further co-operation between IBM and ETH takes place at the Zurich Information Security Center (ZISC) (4).