China will step up efforts this year to combine disparate computing resources across the country into commercial supercomputing grids, a senior IBM official disclosed.
'These promise to be the most visible deployments of grid computing in the world,' IBM Greater China Group chairman and chief executive Henry Chow said.
The projects are expected to narrow the gap between larger grid computing initiatives in the United States and Asia.
Mr Chow said IBM would be unveiling two new projects with select mainland academic institutions over the next 60 days.
Other projects, including research and commercial programmes (to be announced over the next several months) are expected to benefit from IBM's 10 packaged-product and service offerings for grid computing introduced in January.
IBM, the world's largest information technology company (with annual revenues of more than US$80 billion), provided key technologies to the first two Chinese universities to harness computer hardware and software assets into a shared resource over the Internet.
'These grids represent a major opportunity to drive the next tier of economic development for China,' Mr Chow said. The commercial use of these grids would benefit the government, financial institutions, education, health care and the mainland's vast number of small- and medium-sized businesses, he said.