The West Virginia High Technology Consortium (WVHTC) Foundation (http://www.wvhtf.org/) announced today that HP will provide the infrastructure technology that will power the Global Grid Exchange. An initiative of the WVHTC Foundation, the Global Grid Exchange utilizes the Internet to aggregate the idle or unused computer processing resources throughout the State of West Virginia - from PCs to mainframes. With access to such resources, the Global Grid Exchange will soon be the largest open public computing grid in the world. West Virginia will procure from HP the hardware required to support this innovative venture - from desktop PCs for customer service personnel to robust and reliable high-end servers. Using Frontier, the grid computing solution from strategic partner Parabon Computation, the Global Grid Exchange empowers users with an incomparable platform-independent grid computing environment for the easy development and deployment of distributed computing applications. The Global Grid Exchange will deliver unprecedented computing power - on demand - to any desktop computer over the Internet creating a cost-effective computation infrastructure that will drive innovation in the commercial, government and academic sectors around the world. "HP is one of a few technology leaders in the world that offered the range of solutions we required to build this unique grid resource," said James L. Estep, president and CEO of the WVHTC Foundation. "This partnership is a natural extension of HP's long history within the state and we are pleased to be working with them in building this next-generation grid computing solution." "HP is pleased to team with the WVHTC Foundation in bringing this state- sponsored open public grid computing solution to market," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager of the High Performance Computing Division at HP. "The Global Grid Exchange represents a next step in grid computing and further establishes HP's presence in this space." Implementation of the Global Grid Exchange has already begun. It is anticipated that users will be able to access the power of this Internet computing solution in Fall 2004.