The Enterprise Grid Alliance, which was formally launched on Tuesday, will provide reference models, security recommendations and specifications targeted to enable enterprises to run computing grids that run within an enterprise.

"We are primarily concerned about grids within the data center; we are not concerned about capturing CPU cycles on widely distributed desktops," said Donald Deutsch, EGA president and vice president of standards strategy and architecture at Oracle Corp.

Oracle, the prime driver behind the EGA, announced last fall at the rollout of its Oracle 10g database and application server technology that it intended to form a consortium to promote grid computing. It was joined Tuesday by about 20 other IT vendors, including Sun Microsystems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and EMC Corp. in the creation of the EGA. Other EGA members include Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., NEC Corp., Network Appliance Inc., Enigmatec Corporation Ltd., Force10 Networks Inc., Cassatt Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Citrix Systems Inc., Data Synapse, Novell Inc., Optena Corp., Paremus Ltd. and Topspin Communications Inc.

All computing grids connect pools of processing power, storage and application logic via a network. Deutsch described the difference between the computing grids that currently grab the headlines and the grids that EGA envisions as falling into two areas.

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