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Science Grid Genesis
Cranial Dome writes "According to this Cnet.com story, the Department of Energy (DOE) is working to interconnect the first two computers which will form the genesis of the DOE Science Grid, a virtual supercomputing system which will eventually encompass many more systems at several locations. The larger of the two machines: DOE National Energy Research Science Center's (NERSC) IBM SP RS/6000, a distributed memory machine with 2,944 compute processors. This machine, together with a smaller 160 processor Intel system, will make up a combined 3,328 processor Unix system with 1.3 petabytes(!) of storage space. And this is only the beginning..."
I guess it's going to be enough space for a full install of the latest Red Hat distro.
AOL/TW starts mailing out free sign up DVD's to access their portal to the Science Grid. Within days messages start appearing in highly technical discussion forums that simply state "Me Too!".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Win 2004. With all the options.
Best Slashdot Co
According to this paper, the entire human life takes roughly a petabyte of storage.
Using the current prices, this amounts to roughly 150.000. It's not that impossible to store your entire life on a single computer anymore. These guys show that such a thing can be built.
Well it seems as though we may now know what Sony Engineers mean by "Distributed Computing"
Seriously though, What type of security system is the DOE building into this, which is essentially a large mainframe? Its understandable to be worried when the DOE handles things such as nuclear secrets that sometimes slip into the hands of certain researchers, much like they were picking them up at a drive-through.
Im curious to see how the data will be encrypted/decrypted along such a vast system.
There is no spork.
Remember back in 69 when a few government agencies and universities put together a small little network called "ARPANet?"
It started off with something like four nodes. Look where it is today.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I wonder if they'll run the SETI client on it during non-peak times. We could find nothing that much faster!
According to this paper, the entire human life takes roughly a petabyte of storage.
Looks like interesting times for AI researchers. Does AI require as many transistors as the brain has neurons? Does it require the same amount of storage and information? Is there something else needed? Looks like we're soon to answer at least one of these.
Nope, no sig
I copied some of the text into the wrong section.
:P
It should read;
This is approximately 1 trillion bytes or 1,048,576 gigabytes.
under petabytes, not terabytes.
Slashdot regrets the error.
I could care less.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Here, for the lazy, are some of the objectives:
Thus, the applications are enormous. Not that you couldn't do it distributed across desktops à la SETI, but here we're talking data integrity, and let's not forget that even SETI has a kick-ass centralised server setup or the whole thing wouldn't work anyway.
But especially interesting is the document filename:-
DOE_Science_Grid_Collaboratory_Pilot_Proposal_03_1 4.nobudget.pdf
Now, who can get me the version WITH the budget? I want it. Hehe.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I couldn't find how they plan on interconnecting the nodes... I've always thought setups like this were rather hindered by their ability to pass messages quickly between nodes. If it's just standard slow WAN link like a T1, I suppose this would end up becoming more like a distributed.net model, and less an actual 'supercomputer' like the headlines imply. If I'm correct, there's a rather large difference in the applications.
This gives us:
- Disk megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes
- REAL Megabyte = 1,048,576 bytes
Difference = 48,576 bytes, or about 15 floppies worth of space per Mb. With Gb sized disks, the difference is almost 49 floppies per Gb. Definition is everything.Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Quick, someone tell Linda Hamilton to head for the mountains! Her unborn child will be the only one to stop all of this madness!
There is also a point after which keeping an old SGI isn't worth the cost of space, power and upkeep.
And that point comes precisely 4 days 7 hours and 29 minutes after unpacking and turning it on.
- Dan I.
...if they used it to run a simulation of climate and discovered that the Science Grid was responsable for global warming.
(insert your comments about how hot Company X's chips run below)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is a little surprising that it got posted and all because it's not all that earth shatterning news, but I'll provides some additional information about grids in General.
There are a wide variety of systems like this that are either currently available or are being developed. Among them are Particle Physics Data Grid, NEESGrid and various European and Asian counterparts.
The basic premise is to allow access to various resources you don't have at your desktop. This is not to be confused to with putting all these computers together an forking a process a billion times and having it run it run all over the globe. It's more like saying I have a process that requires 128 processors and 4GB of ram, go find it an run it for me.
Most of the systems use Globus which is pretty much the defacto standard. There are other systems out there such as Legion and Condor which serve slightly different purposes.
I've also seen some issues about security raised, so I'll mention them quickly. Globus is built upon an API called GSS (Generic Security System), I believe it will soon (if not already) have an RFC published. This is a layer on top of various other security systems that may be local to the server running it. It can use Kerberos or PKI to do encryption across the network (don't flame me if it's wrong, I'm not security expert).
When I wish to start using the grid, I start up my proxy that takes care of all authentication for me. Then my proxy connects to the gatekeeper on the remote machine which authenticates me based on my private key and then authorizes me via a mapping (usually just a text file). The task is then executed by the gatekeeper via the mapping on the remote machine. Input and output can be redirected over a secure layer if you so desire.
My certificate is issued by an authority. In this case the Globus CA. The nice thing if that if you want to set up a grid of your own computers, you can get a cert from them too. Install Globus and it will tell you how.
Certificates also allow you to get access to data. This allows me as a user A to run program B at site C providing results to user D at site E for a period of time F.
It's all terribly neat and remarkably easy to install on your favorite Linux or Solaris box. It's also fairly easy to write programs to utilize the Grid thanks to the various CogKits for Python, Java and Perl.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Now that you mention it, I'm extrapolating how long until Norton Anti-Virus takes up 1.3 petabytes.....
For Windows- 2008
Everyone else- 12,234
*schwing!*
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
These grids are all great and wonderful as far as peak performance is concerned, but I'm wondering how the latency associated with long haul networks affects peformance for a range of applications that are not embarrassingly parallel.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Another point is the fact that Windows has only been released on a handfull of architectures. To have systems such as this, you need support for ungodly amounts of memory. The best platform for windows at this point is X86, which is limited without more hacks that are worth the time and money.
Even with windows NT on Alpha, windows didn't even come close to tapping the full potential of the architecture. At the time windows NT was the core product for MS servers, MS had a different agenda. Now that the Itaniums are coming, its a good bet that MS may want to try their hand at this market...but I don't think they'll get far.
I also note that when your format a 100 Mb disk, your OS (MacOS and Windows - probably *nix systems too - I haven't tested it) reports the volume size as about 72 Mb. I propose that the cause of the "problem" is the fact that disk manufacturers redefined the term to make their disks appear to have greater capacity.
Think about this: if you are a consumer, do you really care if a megabyte equals 2^20 bytes or one million bytes? I propose that you do not - you simply care that everyone who uses the term "megabyte" means the same thing so you can accurately compare apples to apples. AFAIK, one megabyte of RAM is still 2^20 bytes of RAM. Why shouldn't it be the same for non-volatile media?
How many consumers have called disk manufacturers or other help lines asking "Where did my space go? The label says 100 Mb but my computer says there are only 72. I want my other 28." If you adopt the "solution" you propose, you have to get the RAM industry and the OS providers to adopt it as well to be consistent.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
This is the fallacy of "supercomputer centers" and "supercomputer networks". You don't want 1% of a supercomputer; you want a machine of your own.
There was a time when sharing big number-crunching machines made sense. Until the mid-1980s, there were commercial scientific computing service bureaus running big iron and selling CPU time. They're all gone, along with Control Data Corporation, Cray, and the commercial market for supercomputers.
If you really want a shared big engine cheap, cut a deal with a big hosting provider for off-hours time on the server farm. Set up a Beowulf cluster of a thousand rack-mounted 1U servers, crunching from midnight to 6AM every night. All you'd really need to do is negotiate a bulk buy of offpeak-only shell accounts. All the machines are identical and the cluster has lots of internal bandwidth, so you can get real coordinated work done, not just the low-bandwidth stuff like SETI and cryptanalysis.
So, here is the math I should have done:
-
1 Kilobyte (Kb) = 2^10 bytes = 1,024 bytes
- 48,576 bytes / 1,024 bytes/Kb = 47.44 Kb
So the real difference is about 47K, well under the capacity of a single floppy. I screwed up the math. Too much time practicing law, not enough number crunching. My apologies.Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
GRID Computing is the current sexy term in scientific computing, but its something that is so vague that it can mean all things to all people. Which is perhaps why its suddenly so popular, everyone can get their pet project funded.
To some people it means actualy hardware, routers, fibre, supercomputers, that sort of thing. Certainly in the UK and Europe this group consists mostly of Particle Physicists, see the GridPP Project Homepage for details of whats going on there...mostly the Particl Physicsts seem to have ridiclous amounts of data on their hands (Petabytes/day) that they have to ship. Fun stuff!
To the astronomical community it means software, virtual observatories, data mining and intelligent agents. In the UK and Europe have a look at the AstroGrid and the AVO projects. Although some of us are talking about hardware, the project I'm working on for instance, eSTAR, is putting robotically operated telescopes onto the GRID. However even here the main focus of the project is on the fun stuff we can do with the software, intelligent agents and data mining spring immediately to mind. In the US the NVO is the main focus of GRIDs for the astronomers there...
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
IANAB (biologist), but I think the problem is that nobody understands exactly how the brain works.. Yes we know that there's these neurons sending electrical signals to each other, but I don't think there is any theory on how this ultimately gives rise to the cognitive processes in the brain. Not that I'm saying that supercomputers would be useless in brain research, this article mentions some IBM guy planning to simulate how the "electric storms" during an epileptic seisure propagate or something like that.
National Institute of Standards