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Canada to Launch Countrywide Virtual SuperComputer
LadyCatra writes "A serious shortage of world-class computing power in Canada prompted University of Alberta scientists to create the next best thing -- a countrywide, virtual supercomputer.
On Nov. 4, thousands of computers from research centres across the country will be strung together by a U of A effort to create the most powerful computer in this country.
The full story is here"
Actually, they are Linux Clusters.
I was visiting the Vancouver site a couple of months ago when they were assembling it. It looks sweet. A nice big array of Dual Athalons. The system is being linked together over CA*Net 3, a nation wide OC192 fibre network.
They're also experimenting with distributing different parts of the system in different locales. Like disk storage in one part of the country, heavy number crunchers in the other, to see how distributed a system can really be and still function well.
CA*Net is still looking for applications, the network is being severely underutilized. http://www.canarie.ca/advnet/canet3.html
Google is doing this. Click on a button in the Google Toolbar, and your compute starts number crunching in its idle time.
Check out the Google Compute Faq and the Kuro5hin discussion on the subject.
I think what this really needs is to be make easier for the mainstream, so anyone could do it. Perhaps bundle the tools (programming and deployment) with mainstream operating systems?
Sun have Grid Engine and I believe Intel have something similar. The issue is that this kind of distributed processing is only useful for problems that can be divided into many discrete subtasks, which do not need to interact with other nodes while they are running, otherwise the work you need to do to communicate between nodes slaughters performance (that's why clustering hasn't taken over the world, vertical scaling on an active backplane is still the best solution for most jobs). The typical corporate large-compute job is data mining or decision support, neither of which scale particularly well horizontally.
Virtual Laboratory of Eastern Ontario.
The High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) was formed by a consortium of four universities located in Eastern Ontario (Carleton University, Queen's University, The Royal Military College of Canada, and the University of Ottawa).
http://www.hpcvl.org/
It's also in the Top 500 supersomputer list, so it must be half-decent. So if four universities can have a dencent computer in Canada, others probably do too.