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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"
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.
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.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
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 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 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.
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.
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.