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Power players from the technology industry have joined forces to form the Globus Consortium. The purpose of the group is to promote grid computing within the business sector.

The Globus Consortium, consisting of industry giants Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems, is aiming to promote standards of grid-computing. The group is also developing software in order to help large business in their adoption of industry standards.

According to InformationWeek:

Grid computing, which can give scientists and engineers access to powerful computers over the Internet, has gained popularity in recent years as research labs and some companies in sectors including design and manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, finance, and oil exploration want to run extremely complex computer programs that can be distributed among many machines, some of which may be in another location.

By aggregating the computations performed by these machines and delivering an answer to a user's desktop computer, teams can run their programs on a kind of virtual supercomputer without the expense of purchasing one. One popular way of doing that has been using the Globus software. A fourth version of the open-source program is due in April.

Microsoft turned down an opportunity to join the Globus Consortium, choosing to pursue other options. The software leviathan also scoffed at the idea of an open-source toolkit.

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