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Grid Computing and IBM

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the daily-dose-of-PR-hype dept.

cozimek writes: "I just read this article from the NY Times that discusses a plan by IBM to leverage their support of the Linux platform to build grid computing. IBM has already won support of grid projects for supercomputing in England and the Netherlands, and now seems ready to take on the Internet. Of course, the article says it could be many years before we see any fruits of this bounty." This has been submitted many times, so we're posting it. But somehow I resent the fact that it's just a vaporous press release generating this hype, taking advantage of a well-known idea that many are already working on and was forecast many, many years ago.

27 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Public Grid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    Does this mean that I can plug into the grid and charge IBM for computing power similar to people who generate power and charge the electric company for the surplus?

    1. Re:Public Grid by Ed+Avis · · Score: 2

      I assume you mean 'megaFLOPS hour', in other words million floating point operations per second, for one hour. That's a silly unit (as is the 'kilowatt hour' used for electricity). Rather than dividing by seconds and then multiplying by hours, it would be better to measure per gigaFLOP (3.6 gigaFLOP = 1 megaFLOPS hour).

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  2. Re:GRIDs? by torpor · · Score: 2

    I thought the exact same thoughts.

    I miss my old Grid. Man, that was a sexy machine. Red plasma screen, locked down tight. Nice, nice box.

    I'd love to have one of those now. Wish I'd never junked my old Gridpad.

    --
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  3. Re:GRIDs? by Craig+Maloney · · Score: 2
    Sadly, that's the first thing I thought of... I was thinking "Gee, did IBM have something to do with the demise of GRID? Were the GRIDs in competition with the convertible for "behemoth of the year" when IBM stifled the competition?

    Alright... admit it... who here pines for the days of plasma screens? :)

  4. Moore's Law versus Grid Computing by Doug+Merritt · · Score: 3
    Grid computing was hyped back in the 1960s (Multics was targeted towards that, IIRC). It never happened because of Moore's Law. Cheap processors means it's been more cost effective in most cases to buy your own cpu than to lease it from a grid.

    A science fiction novel I read recently (Permutation City by Greg Egan), however, reminded me that this may eventually change, if and when Moore's Law stops working.

    If compute power hits a stable plateau in 10, 20, 100 years, whatever, then the cost of compute power will also roughly become a constant number of dollars per clock cycle (or peta-clock cycle).

    In that case, as Egan presents it, compute power from a global grid may indeed be the only way to get larger amounts of compute power than your local processor can give you, and therefore, as a commodity, it may go to the highest bidder at any given moment.

    (Hopefully not so badly as with California's power grid bidding, but we'll see.)

    P.S. the advent of nanotechnology computers, or quantum computers, or purely optical computing, etc, wouldn't dispel the above scenario, it would just delay it. It's not clear that even Vinge's Singularity would literally prevent Moore's law from going away. (I don't believe that the Singularity will do away with the laws of physics.)

    --
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    1. Re:Moore's Law versus Grid Computing by dpilot · · Score: 3

      > If compute power hits a stable plateau in 10, 20, 100 years, whatever, then the cost of compute power will also roughly become a constant number
      >of dollars per clock cycle (or peta-clock cycle).

      IMHO, we're very close to this point, if not there already. But in a different way. Consider this an economic limit, not a technological one. We can keep shrinking chips, but it keeps getting more and more expensive to do so.

      The first hint came with the sub-$1000 computer. Prior to that, a top-end PC was about $2000-$3000, with a lower priced PC about $1500-$2000. We kept buying all the power we could afford. But with the sub-$1000 computer a class of users began buying all the power they NEEDED, and let the cost ride down. More expensive PCs became the tools of gamers and technical use, and Microsoft was the only force pushing basic compute power upward.

      I'd like to upgrade to a 1.5 GHz Palomino this Fall, about my normal schedule, but times are tight, so I'm probably going to pass for another year. (Maybe a Hammer, then!) And to look seriously at it, my K6-3 does just about everything I ask of it. Star Trek Elite Force runs great, RealMyst was lackluster, though.

      --
      The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  5. Who does what? by rho · · Score: 3

    I'm not sure I understand -- who provides this "grid"? Are they built and maintained by IBM around the world? I don't think IBM would be thrilled to discover that Compaq is using the IBM grid to advance Compaq's bottom line. I like IBM, don't get me wrong -- but I doubt they're such humanitarians.

    Is the "grid" made up of PCs on the Internet? First, most of those PCs are on dial-up connections, making things very complicated (and the PCs themselves not very useful). Second, who compensates the people who own the PCs? Is it strictly voluntary, like SETI@home? If so, how will anti-nuke activists prevent Los Alamos from running simulation calculations on their PowerMac?

    I think the idea is fantastic, but I'd like a few more details..

    --
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    1. Re:Who does what? by Ralph+Wiggam · · Score: 2

      The article mentions that IBM is setting up a grid of nine research centers accross Britain. I immediately thought of another network that traces its origins to a handfull of research centers. The internet grew beyond the bounds of what its founders ever imagined. Maybe this will too. As for grid connected PCs, I would be willing to bet that by the time any grid is ready to accept PCs, that dial-up connections will be a fuzzy memory.

      -B

    2. Re:Who does what? by e7 · · Score: 2

      Funny ... all the anti-nuke activists I know have PowerMacs, too.

      --
      Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
    3. Re:Who does what? by saider · · Score: 2

      The gist that I got was that the internet served as a backbone for a VPN. In order to connect to the grid you would probably need to log on (via the internet again), at which point IBM starts metering your disk usage and CPU cycles. That's just my impression, tho; I got no facts.


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    4. Re:Who does what? by PEdelman · · Score: 2

      From what I understand, it is not like a everybody can tap in to "the grid", but certain organizations can link their computers to form their own grid.

      You can't hurt me with the things that you do,
      I pick up dandelions and I give them to you.

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    5. Re:Who does what? by hyrdra · · Score: 2

      Somebody eating up a whole bunch of processing time to brute force cyptographic codes

      ...

      Will the processing power be so immense that it won't fill up?

      Yes. Even the most difficult of tasks won't use up *all* the bandwidth. And I'm sure the system will have some type of safe guards against extreme usage such as attempts to harm it, etc. We're talking about 500-1000 MHz * thousands, and lots of memory too.

      --


      "I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
    6. Re:Who does what? by hyrdra · · Score: 3

      I'm not sure I understand -- who provides this "grid"? Are they built and maintained by IBM around the world? I don't think IBM would be thrilled to discover that Compaq is using the IBM grid to advance Compaq's bottom line. I like IBM, don't get me wrong -- but I doubt they're such humanitarians.

      Think Internet. Right now, we're paying for bandwidth, because the Internet is largely an information-only medium. However, in the future, we will also be able to have a certain amount of processing power, shared by everyone, used by everyone. IBM is just providing the structure (and at first the systems for the demo) to access mass computational resources. Soon, you will be able to access network wide applications which are processed on many machines across the network in a distributed way.

      Right now we have an enormous processing surplus. Most machines sit unused for hours. Check your load averages if you don't believe me. Even a personal desktop used 8+ hours a day will barely break a few percent. Now imagine if we had some infrastructure, which is what IBM is aiming to do, to harness and unite all this power for general use? We would have an enormous amount of processing power available.

      Is the "grid" made up of PCs on the Internet? First, most of those PCs are on dial-up connections, making things very complicated (and the PCs themselves not very useful). Second, who compensates the people who own the PCs? Is it strictly voluntary, like SETI@home? If so, how will anti-nuke activists prevent Los Alamos from running simulation calculations on their PowerMac?

      Bandwidth will come in time. Even so, imagine having all of AOL's dialup connections available for processing. 56k isn't that much, but imagine millions of connections at once. As soon as we get lots of bandwidth and always-on connections wide-spread, this will be much easier. It's an upgrade path too. We can still start now and as people get faster connections and faster machines, the overall system power will increase.

      As far as compensation, this is a public thing. We all use each other's resources, and we all contribute to the available processing resources. The sum of the parts of something are greater than one part alone, working alone. Similar to how Gnutella users each contribute and take, and why it works so well. Just translate the information into processing power. You can take as much or as little as you want, most people falling somewhere in between (this is how it always is and is a regular pattern).

      I'm sure there are going to be leeches. But many people will want to share because they realize how the system works. Distributed systems like Gnutella do work (albeit a few leeches here and there), and this is proof that a processing system will also work.

      --


      "I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
    7. Re:Who does what? by it's+a+culture+thing · · Score: 2

      yes, no and kinda. By not everyone, individuals and most researchers can't access the grid at the moment (and in fairness the ones who can are already the ones with access to the big iron machines). Its going to be about 3 years before access becomes wide spread at universities, prob 5 for government and industry to start using it and 10+ for home users and small businesses. How the system works can best be described as Virtual organisations. For which the best description is An organisation that can be created for a specific project, which can last from days to years with facilities, people and data distributed throughout the world, all of which need access to data which is protected from unauthorised access and with the ability to request processing from a variety of sources according to their needs by the use of software agents. e.g. Tell your agent "I want to do a galaxy simulation requiring X Gflops of processing" the agent goes away, finds out whose supercomputer is available, agrees price to process and then runs returning results to the user. The difficult part at the moment (and I get to write my PhD thesis on how we solve it 8( ) is how we can authenticate and track millions upon millions of systems with different resources and then have a billing structure in place so people get compensated accordingly. Of course the fun part is having different operating systems, different data formats, time zones, certificate authorities and a host of other problems to deal with especially billing. This isn't the free flow of information which the internet is *supposed* to be, these are physical assets which cost money and there is an opportunity cost in using processors in terms of power, support, initials costs etc.

  6. Yes, read the article (and its references) by FreeUser · · Score: 3
    The intro posted is not correct. The article says that Grid software infrastructure is being developed on the "open source model," it does not say that it incoporates Linux (although I'm sure Linux will be a major OS used with it). MS has also contributed $1 million to the effort, and hopes to tie in .NET

    The intro is absolutely correct, which if you'd done any digging whatsoever *cough*google*cough* you would have found for yourself:


    It will be based on Globus and Linux software which uses the internet as an underlying communication system. [Atkinson, 2001]


    It really can't be stated much more clearly than that.
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  7. Read the Article! by jcc · · Score: 2

    The intro posted is not correct. The article says that Grid software infrastructure is being developed on the "open source model," it does not say that it incoporates Linux (although I'm sure Linux will be a major OS used with it). MS has also contributed $1 million to the effort, and hopes to tie in .NET, and Sun already has a type of Grid deployed under Solaris for corporate computer networks.

  8. wtf? by jon_c · · Score: 2

    So how is this different than any distributed processing network? The problem with disturbed processing is that it's only good for tasks that:

    A. large/complicated enough to constitute such a network: nuclear simulation, weather prediction, chess, encryption. Most of which have no little to no interest to the common user.

    B. Can be distributed, Seti and encryption work because a central server can farm out sections of work to different clients. For most tasks this is not practical, especially real time problems.

    C. Doesn't need a big pipe. for example a rendering farm, or maybe mp3 compression would be nice, unfortunately the data is to large to make it worth while.

    -Jon

    --
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  9. ten thousand years ago by twitter · · Score: 2
    Sure it's old. Pervasive computing? IBM might have had this in mind when it partnered with MS and it's (Q)DOS. After all, the Quick and Dirty Operating System and 8 bit computers were supposed to provide smarter terminals. Combine these smarter terminals with the then building DARPA net and you can see that someone must have had this in mind twenty years ago.

    Since then MS has revealed far more oppresive vision for "grid" computing. Where did you want to go ten years ago?

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  10. Re:Sun is already there! by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2

    Sun's Grid Engine doesn't seem nearly as powerful as the Globus toolkit used by the Grid.

  11. BBC Article by Maran · · Score: 4

    Here's a link to the BBC Article. Maran

  12. Re:Faster than Moore's Law? by RobertAG · · Score: 2

    Moore's law (actually it is more of a prediction) dealt with semiconductor densities doubling every 18 months. This implies a drop of cost and an increase in performance. Of course you have to wait for it to happen.

    For those who have an IMMEDIATE need for high performance computing, parallel systems are the answer. Simply put, you can have access to high performance computing now rather than wait for a single machine to become cheap enough.

    But don't forget that Moore's law made this all possible. Smaller components also made cheap, high-speed communications commonplace. This can only mean that the cost of setting up such a grid will become cheaper over time, not more expensive.

    Look at AOL, for example. They provide a distributed service to millions of people. This is made possible because communications and computing power is cheaper more than it has ever been. The longer it is in existance, the more services they offer. This happens without an appreciable increase in price.

    The same thing will happen with grid computing. It may be a specialty item NOW, but in the future, it will become a CHEAP commodity, not an expensive one.

  13. More Info About Grid Computing... by mikegi · · Score: 2
    Is this slashdot's first DataGrid related posting?

    More info about the DataGrid...

  14. MSNBC article too! by GlassUser · · Score: 2
    It's at http://www.msnbc.com/news/608152.asp?0dm=C12MT. This appears to be just an extension of the secondary purpose of the internet - distributed research. But instead of being able to connect to a supercomputer across the country, it allows a researcher to connect to ALL the supercomputers across the country . . .

    Even tastier, though, how many PCs in university labs are wasting cycles (or using them on SETI@home or dnet)? Wonder how likely it would be to get a client on those and use it like another big computer?

    --
    funny munging
  15. Futures anyone? by evanbd · · Score: 2

    So wil this create a clock-cycle futures market? seems like an interesting idea. Betting on the future price of computation in a direct way. Of course, there is the issue of measuring. Perhaps sold as 100 CPU-secs on an IMB model FOO 6000 with specs....

  16. IBM's late - we've already built one by cprael · · Score: 2
    For the animation industry. It's called an on-demand rendering farm, and we're a bit cheaper than Kinkos for CPU time. We charge for CPU resources used, that's it. http://www.netrendered.com

    Oh, to answer the economic argument, unless you're doing a LOT of computing, it's cheaper to lease the time than to buy. I can give you ~30 hours/month of system time for less than you can buy _one_ equivalent machine. And my way (a) it's tax-deductible, and (b) you only pay as you go - not all up front.

  17. Sun is already there! by Arethan · · Score: 4

    Enter Sun Grid Engine

    And yep, it's free!

  18. Vaporous, but still gives it exposure... by baptiste · · Score: 3
    I agree its a vanilla corporate release, but its good news. A lot of people don't even know what grid computing is. This can help spread the word of yet another excellent OSS project

    I had heard of grid computing before, but hadn't read much about it. Google turned up lots of resources this mornign - worth teh read. The article was right - the software to manage a grid will be super complex and the security implications are daunting.

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