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"

Comments

Sun is Right

[e8johan]

"The Network is the Computer"

It would be nice to see a worldwide system. If this is going to work there must be some CPU time quota system, perhaps a quota that can be bought and sold. This could make it interesting for ordinary home users to join (earn quota, sell quota, make $$$). There are many projects in the academic world that could never make a SETI@home launch, since the research is to boring. Still, we need to use all that idle time buring away across the world.

Custom solution for a specific task?

[jukal]

The article does not seem to mention whether they use a ready made grid/distributed computing platform or are they whipping up it themselves? Or am I blind? Does anyone know more about this? And what do they mean by:

"The computers will be linked by the Internet, but involve a simple networking system, Lu said. Keeping the linkage as simple as possible was the goal."

Based on the article I would assume that they have made a custom tailored system (if not kludge) for one specific purpose ("for calculating energy shifts as two molecules are manipulated around 3-D space") - and not a platform which could be easily tailored and managed to solve different kinds of tasks with different kinds of relationships between the tasks.

Ohh, I could also link my grid computing links.

Re:Distributed computing?

[FTL]

>Why didn't they just make a client program for distributed computing so the entire country/world could help out?

Because there will always be creeps who won't play fair. Much of the work that SETI@home does is security, combatting those who would submit false or abreviated results in order to get higher stats. UofA want to do real computing on a variety of applications. They've concluded that it is more efficent (for their purposes) to go for a small pool whose results they can trust, than to go for a large pool whose results they have to check and double-check.

Each approach has significant advantages and disadvantages. It depends on the type of work you are interested in performing.