The Globus Project and Computational Grids?

SigmoidCurve asks: "The latest issue of The Economist (sorry no URL, using the quaint paper version) has an article about software used to create 'computational grids' like those used with SETI@home. They mention the Globus project which is released under an open source license. The Economist article speculates on the future of the Grid and what kinds of projects would benefit from becoming massively parallelized. What does the Slashdot community think of this and similar projects? Does anyone have any comments about Globus or other such software? What projects do you know about that could take advantage of the untold billions of idle processor cycles lying in wait?" For those of you looking for more information on the Globus Project, you can check out their FAQ.

Comments

Additional information

[hugui]

There's a very good book called "The Grid: blueprint for a new computing infrastructure" that describes the grid concept, its future and many of its possibles application. It's basically a collection of papers written by the main people behind this. I don't have a link at hand, but I'm sure Amazon has it. Is a very expensive book, so I borrowed it from my university library.

I remember a seminar that I attended at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center regarding Globus and the Grid, and thinking "uau, THIS is the future of computing". It was presented by people from NCSA ( National Center for Supercomputing Applications ) who were extremely knowledgeable and open to all kind of questions. Among other things ( 3 days of seminar ) they showed how they connected multiple Crays and SGI Origin computer across the world that were running Globus ( one from Germany, one from PSC and I believe one from UCSD or NCSA ) for a real-time calculation for a phyical experiment.

electronic version + my thoughts

[NaturePhotog]

The electronic version can be found here. However, it requires a subscription or $2.95 to read the article. I have the latter, but no desire to part with it for this :-) Babbage: I think there are so few responses because this article isn't visible on the front page. It takes a search or clicking on "older stuff" to find it. At least that's how I did. I think using spare CPU cycles for such projects is great, as long as:

• the results from the public's participation are made public, not kept for private gain as was reported with some drug and genome distributed research projects. If they want to make money from it, then they should pay for the CPU time, and state what they're doing up front
• computers aren't left on simply to run such programs

When the power crisis hit here in California, SETI@Home specifically requested that SETI users turn off their computers during stage 2 and 3 power alerts, and has since added a page on "running green", which also suggests that you turn off your monitor when not in use, and requests that you not keep your computer on just to run SETI@Home. And it has some handy links to sources about conserving energy, too.