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Teragrid: Massive Grid Computing
onyxcide writes: "Envision is running a quick article on a new national grid of computing resources called TeraGrid. Half a petabyte of disk storage, 40-gigabyte-per-second national optical backbone, and 13 teraflops of computing power will make up this monster. It will allow "lavish amounts of online data to be continually available for instantaneous analysis, data mining, and knowlege synthesis." There's another article in the same magazine here: Transforming Research with High-Performance Grid Computing" LighthouseJ adds some details: "C|Net's news.com has a story about a new Compaq supercomputer named Terascale. It uses 3,000 Alpha EV68 processors distributed over 750 servers using networking systems from Quadrics. They say it can perform as fast as 10,000 desktop PC's combined in one second. The massive computer will make it's official debut on Monday at the Supercomputing Center in Pittsburgh PA."
Wow, some part of my mind is drooling!
;)
The groundwork for a Matrix/Johnny Mnemonic-style cyberspace, anyone?
If you're going to be in Denver the week of Nov 12, 2001, consider stopping by. If nothing else, the place will have free and open 802.11b!
-- Stanislav Shalunov
Well, the parachute pants might slow him down a bit.
Got to hear a talk from Henri Casanova, one of the top dogs working on distributed application scheduleing and simulation software for The Grid. Neat stuff, but, as he addressed in his talk, we're really looking at a network of computers that only people needing massively intensive computations done on highly parallizable problems would find useful. Translation: only researchers in certain fields need this.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
FYI, this will be updated after supercomputing, but this is the list of the fastest computers in the world.
The Pittsburgh's super'puter will rank up there with LANL's new one (also a Compaq based one). Pittsburgh's will be the fastest SC for nonclassified work.
I'm not sure whether or not it'll dethrone LLNL's ASCI White or not. It does knock seaborg @ NERSC from the fastest unclassified SC spot though.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Moore's law refers to the number of transistors that will be packed onto an integrated circuit. Doesn't say anything about processing power let alone massive computer arrays.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
There would be plenty of room for speculation, and participants in the market would basically be betting on Moore's law, in addition to the other economic factors common to all derivatives markets.
The problems I forsee are to do with the standardization of the contracts. We would need to agree on an architecture, and a delivery method for the CPU cycles. All in all though, this could be a really lucrative business, especially with the demand for GHz from Hollywood movie studios set to explode in the near future due to actors being replaced with CGI animation.
Sometimes I feel like I am living in a Bruce Sterling or William Gibson novel, the pace of technology just seems to get faster and faster.
All please read that announcement as having said "40 gigabit," 'cause that's what it is. Still fast... 4x OC-192.
God knows how the research people pay for this. Impoverished corporations like my employer still dick around with multiples of T1.
Avaki were in peddling their grid computing solution, and I had to say to the guy... "do you have any idea how little bandwidth we have?"
Grid computing will affect the rest of us when everyone can get high speed network connections.