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Grid Computing Coming Of Age
ravenousbugblatter writes "The New York Times online has an article discussing grid computing and recent advances made by Dr. Ian Foster, among others. The article compares the state of grid computing over the internet to where the internet was in 1994, which was soon after the development of the software for the use of URL's, HTML, and HTTP. Predictions are made in the article that in the near future the massive power of grid computing will be available to anyone with an internet connection, not just to big companies that can afford to hire HP and Sun to run a grid project for them."
Its the 4th one, and getting better every year.
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Can anyone see another player apart from Microsoft having the market penetration required to make themselves the defacto distributed computing platform??
Go Google I say - let microsoft get someone else to beta test their software.
Q.
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Teaching Computers to Work in Unison
By STEVE LOHR
Computers do wondrous things, but computer science itself is largely a discipline of step-by-step progress as a steady stream of innovations in hardware, software and networking pile up. It is an engineering science whose frontiers are pushed ahead by people building new tools rendered in silicon and programming code rather than the breathtaking epiphanies and grand unifying theories of mathematics or physics.
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Yet computer science does have its revelatory moments, typically when several advances come together to create a new computing experience. One of those memorable episodes took place in December 1995 at a supercomputing conference in San Diego. For three days, a prototype project, called I-Way, linked more than a dozen big computer centers in the United States to work as if a single machine on computationally daunting simulations, like the collision of neutron stars and the movement of cloud patterns around the globe.
There were glitches and bugs. Only about half of the 60 scientific computer simulations over the I-Way worked. But the participants recall those few days as the first glimpse of what many computer scientists now regard as the next big evolutionary step in the development of the Internet, known as grid computing.
"It was the Woodstock of the grid -- everyone not sleeping for three days, running around and engaged in a kind of scientific performance art," said Dr. Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, who was the program chairman for the conference.
The idea of lashing computers together to tackle computing chores for users who tap in as needed -- almost as if a utility -- has been around since the 1960's. But to move the concept of distributed computing utilities, or grids, toward practical reality has taken years of continuous improvement in computer processing speeds, data storage and network capacity. Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, has been to design software able to juggle and link all the computing resources across far-flung sites, and deliver them on demand.
The creation of this basic software -- the DNA of grid computing -- has been led by Dr. Ian Foster, a senior scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory and a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Carl Kesselman, director of the center for grid technologies at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.
They have worked together for more than a decade and, a year after the San Diego supercomputing conference, they founded the Globus Project to develop grid software. It is supported mainly by the government, with financing from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
There has been a flurry of grid projects in the last few years in the United States, Europe and Japan, most of them collaborations among scientific researchers at national laboratories and universities on projects like climate modeling, high-energy physics, genetic research, earthquake simulations and brain research. More recently, computer companies including IBM, Platform Computing, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have become increasingly interested in grid technology, and some of the early commercial applications include financial risk analysis, oil exploration and drug research.
This month, grid computing moved further toward the commercial mainstream when the Globus Project released new software tools that blend the grid standards with a programming technology called Web services, developed mainly in corporate labs, for automated computer-to-computer communications.
Enthusiasm for grid computing is also broadening among scientists. A report this year by a National Science Foundation panel, "Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure," called for new financing of $1 billion a year to mak
As for security, authentication and authorization are challenging, and you may be pretty sure that Joe Schmoe will not have access to these resources.
The following article gives a nice overview :
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-55/iss-2/p42.html
With the upcoming PS3 carrying out grid computing, there's no stopping for this technology reaching out to the masses, even those who don't know it!
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
I prefer the term distributed computing, why did distributed computing turn in to grid computing?
Oh, my god...least insightful post, ever. Do you have any idea what grid computing applications are? I've actually met Ian Foster, as I did some work on Globus for a semester. They're talking about moving around petabytes of data for analysis and storage. You have no idea the complexity of these issues. For instance, there's a program called the Digital Sky Survey...i'm not going to bother looking for links because right now I'm using my trolling account and I don't feel like logging in as my "serious" persona and I don't care about karma. Anyway, massive telescopes around the world pan every miliarcsecond of the sky, record their images, and then put them in the survey for view by researchers all over the world. Each image of each fraction of an arcsecond of the sky takes up megabytes. Combined, the map of the sky is petabytes in size. That's 10^15, bucko. You try just storing that data, let alone analyzing it, searching it, and recalling it, using fucking seti@home style tech.
There were several other applications under development...I remember a paricle collider of some kind that produced some obscene amount of data for each event. Something like a terabyte milisecond or something, and it was almost impossible just to gather the data...again, let alone store, analyze, and recall.
Seti@home? I scoff. I hope you choke on your ignorance.
0.1 is 10% ? Load average is NOT cpu usage.. Hell you could bring it to "300%" if you compiled a few things at the same time..
Timesharing is multiple people/jobs connecting to one mainframe or computer and "sharing" the useage of that single computer. Grid computing (aka distributed computing) is sharing one job over multiple computers. Totally different concept, completely different target audience.
now how did it go again? Ah, thats right....
*points and laughs* hahahahahahahahahahahaha
(I have mod points, but there is no -1 WRONG.... so I decided to take the piss instead
IBM, as well as other companies and organizations, is working on the Globus project and there are different scenarios out there. One of which is online gaming (butterfly.net). There are others, but right now, it's mainly scientific based. For the people who know, the Globus toolkit just reached version 3. This is important to know because this version is OGSA/OGSI (in draft) compliant which is an open standard describing the communication between the grid nodes (WSDL, WSDD, XML, etc). The grid is different from clusters and the grid is different from p2p computing. One view on the grid is use of remote resources. For instance, you can use en electron microscope remotely. Perhaps even with the DaVinci surgical machine, it would be possible to perform (minor) surgery remotely. The advantages of this are obvious. A specialist can help more people since it cuts on travel time. In my view, the grid cannot be applied to a certain solution meaning the grid isn't supposed to be for a certain problem, but rather, a new avenue to do things. With this in mind, the grid will grow according to how we think of using it. The Internet is an example of this type of growth. Furthermore, the grid is probably geared towards businesses and other backend operations. Later, perhaps, it'll become more of on online service directory in which you can find resources to do you work; printing facility, specialized resource use (super/quantum computers), and other things. Again, the grid will grow will become what we need it to be (even if we cannot predict it).
All aside, it's exciting technology, not to mention that the Globus toolkit was named on the of the top 10 techs that will change the world.
For those interested in security, the Globus toolkit involves an asynchronous certificate signing method initially and then move onto a synchronous method for better performance. The Globus books and papres call this a PKI scneario. (I'm not a security guy)
Also Globus is not the only grid tech out there. Seti at home is one (and their derivatives). There are also distributed storage methods in which you can send data onto the grid and it'll be there (somewhere safely tucked away).
fun stuff!
Also, Globus is open source and the services are written in Java. I just love this stuff.
No; it's mainly universities and researchers.
If you wanted to do this right now, you could cut a deal with a mid-range ISP.
A single company may not have all the resources you need. You may wish to harness a beowulf cluster from company A, terabytes of storage from company B and use data from a telescope owned by company C.
Also demand may be transient, you might need hundreds of GFlops one minute, then nothing for hours. It's a waste to have your own system that does nothing most of the time.
Remember "push technology"? "Micropayments"? "Grid computing" will go the same way.
I seriously doubt that. I would guess there's far more money, research and working examples of Grid computing.
Don't flippantly write off something you clearly know little about.
No, you can't. Just try finding an ISP that would risk disrupting their systems to let you do that. The promise of the Grid is that it creates a standardized method of sharing computing resources, with a rich security model, so that ISPs could deploy grid software on their systems and know that grid applications are well-behaved. In the Globus Toolkit framework, for example, all grid applications run within an application server container, such as Tomcat, which means they're in a Java sandbox and can't muck with things they're not supposed to.