It's good to be a purveyor of grid computing software this week.

IBM, Sun Microsystems are among the vendors trotting out new grid computing (define) offerings today as part of the GridWorld conference in Washington, D.C.

IBM will announce Tivoli Dynamic Workload Broker, new software from its Batch-on-Grid portfolio that helps customers virtualize their grid computing environments and manage their data from a single console on the fly without manual tinkering.

Such a tool is particularly attractive in financial services and insurance companies that use batch functions to pipe computing jobs to queues and schedule them for processing; the technique has been used since the 1950s.

Grid Computing general has seen an uptick in recent years. Software advances from vendors like IBM, Sun Microsystems, Platform Computing and others are helping companies leverage existing servers and gear instead of buying new hardware.

The new software will be available worldwide electronically on October 6 and on disk on October 27, 2006. Pricing for the Broker will be determined.

IBM today also boosted its Grid Ecosystem program to help IBM business partners and software vendors to win new customers, adding a new Grid and Grow Test Drive offering for reseller partners.

In this program, IBM partners may access IBM Business Partner Innovation Centers (BPIC) to demonstrate grid computing software to clients. Perks include assistance in providing technical and industry education and sales enablement.

Sun, one of IBM's greatest grid rivals, this week is showing off its own grid acumen at GridWorld through a fresh partnership with chipmaker AMD.

Looking to accelerate the pace of bringing products to market, AMD has selected the Sun Grid Compute Utility, which allows customers to procure grid computing as a utility at $1 per hour per CPU, to test and simulate new processors.

AMD said in a statement that, rather than purchase additional infrastructure to conduct processor simulations, AMD opted for Sun's grid.

The move seems to be a natural fit; Sun's grid is Sun Fire servers based on AMD's Opteron processors.

Finally, in a development that lovers of technology standards can appreciate, the Open Grid Forum (OGF), formed from the merger of the Global Grid Forum (GGF) and the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) last year, officially launched as a combined organization to promote the advancement of grid computing for the world.

The OGF's new board of directors include EMC's Ian Baird, HP'sMartin Walker, IBM's Ken King, Microsoft's Tony Hey and Oracle's Bob Thome.

The group will draft a white paper on the role of grids in distributed computing systems and will work on specifications that trigger interoperability in grid software.