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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"
This seems like a really good idea, I don't really understand why more places don't do this. I mean most of us work in offices where the computer power is amazing and largely untapped.
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?
It's just an idea, my NeXT had Zilla (it's version of this) years ago - seems a shame that this hasn't caught on more widely. So come on Apple - let's see it, put it in the Darwin project and put a nice UI on it in Mac OS X.
Anyway, before activating It, make sure It doesn't have any access to a spare nuclear warhead on orbit around Earth.
"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.
"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.
The article isn't very specific on the kind of problems they will try to solve. The 'search' problems, where you have a big search space than can be easily divided into smaller chunks are easy. Unfortunately some problems cannot be easily split into many independent parts - simulations generally fall into this category. Weather simulations, nuclear explosion simulations, well, simulations in general :-). You can just assign each computer a square mile of terrain, do the computations for the whole simulations, then merge the results - the neighboring squares interact, so computers have to communicate after each time slice. This is where communication will probably slow your 'network supercomputer' down. No matter how fat the pipes are, they will be several orders of magnitude slower than an internal supercomputer bus in terms of latency. To put it short: this might be of some use, but they better start gathering money for a real supercomputer.
From the article Gerald Oakham and his fellow physicists have a problem. In the hunt for the most elusive speck of matter known to science, they are about to generate more data than any computer on the planet can analyse.
My school, in conjunction with the Université de Sherbrooke (mostly the U de S) are setting up a world-class beowulf cluster for general scientific work. A physics professor at my University, who also happens to be a world class astronomer (Dr. Lorne Nelson) has a research grant that he is using to help with the funding for this cluster.
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.
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I don't understand why they feel the need to isolate their Canadian initiative, rather than giving Canada the access to computing power far greater than they can acheive on their own.
Probably because the Canadian researchers got tired of hearing things like, "so, ye'all are from Keaynada, huh? We was just sittin up on the ruff and be drinkin sum pap."
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I clipped this out of reuters....
Today, the Canadian Ministry for computing announced their initial tests of the Canada-wide massive computer project..
Computer Scientist Thom Serveaux had this to say," when we switched it on every command was answered with the word "eh?" and it kept calling us "knobs" and was asking for "back bacon" we are trying to see if there is any problems in northern nodes that were like the Quebec nodes that started a fight with the other nodes demanding every command to be repeated in french."
Updates will be posted on their progress..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Isn't William Shatner from Canada? Maybe this is an attempt to develop a more powerful 'Priceline SuperComputer'....
A supercomputer capable of creating more convincing commercials, perhaps?
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Saving up for a "real" supercomputer is a pipe dream. Supercomputers cost several million dollars a year in upkeep, and that's the killer. You might easily get grants to allow a project to use 'x' dollars worth of computing, but nobody is going to approve a capital grant that requires millions each year.
When the University of Toronto did purchase a Cray in the mid-eighties, there was a massive fight. Many felt that the resources to support the Cray were sucking money desperately needed everywhere else. (although, boy, we in meteorology a happy bunch...)
While lower profile and somewhat more painful to use, this is far more practical solution for the realities of academic computing today.
As many of the other posters have pointed out, this work isn't necessarily new, but it is news.
There are other tools out there which do this: Legion, Avaki, Sun Grid Engine, Globus, to name a few but the goal is to create a network of (mostly) supercomputers which doesn't require a lot of reconfiguration at each site. What differentiates this work from many other approaches is that it is transparent to the system administrator.
For those who ask "why can't you just do something let seti@home" the answer is that not all problems in science and business can be easily decomposed into small chunks. Bandwidth requirements and latency may also be a problem. A lot of scientific programmers have to worry about communications much more than about processing power (although this tradeoff has been seesawing backwards and forwards with new advances in both technologies).
There's a worldwide effort through both business and academia to create a number of good, interoperating frameworks for doing this sort of transient, virtualised supercomputer.
Have a look at the Global Grid Forum (which is becoming the focus for Grid computing standards) for more information.
Search for the elusive beer molecule. Eh.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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.