Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Grid Computing Coming Of Age

Posted by timothy on from the upside-of-supersizing dept.

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."

9 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Does the average user care? by chenGOD · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sure this is great if you're doing simulations or animating/rendering stuff . But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal? How will this affect network security?

    1. Re:Does the average user care? by BWJones · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure this is great if you're doing simulations or animating/rendering stuff . But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal? How will this affect network security?

      Well, I guess the obvious answer is that this is Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Not News for Joe Schmoe.

      --
      Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
    2. Re:Does the average user care? by BWJones · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure this is great if you're doing simulations or animating/rendering stuff . But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal? How will this affect network security?

      Aside from my rather glib answer to the parent post, I should have added that for the average Joe Schmoe surfing the web, grid computing is very important for web-searches, hierarchical analysis of searches and valid links and if the spam load keeps increasing, we will have to have grids just to handle the load of email onslaught. Seriously though, all you have to do is examine any of the search engine companies. Take Google for instance. How do you think they do what they do? Grid computing is the answer.

      --
      Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
  2. Re:As a coder... by quinkin · · Score: 3, Insightful
    If you can crack a 2k keyed encryption stream using a well regarded encryption scheme (not a simple hash like MD5), then I am impressed.

    If all you can do is "to see if the original cleartext is a word found in a given dictionary file" then get a life.

    Wow, how revolutionary, and so suited to distributed computing (NOT).

    When you have access to REAL computing power, you realise exactly what the government can do with your static keyed vpn connection and PGP (hehe) emails.

    Q.

    --
    Insert Signature Here
  3. Read between the hype.. by djmitche · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is great if you think it's great. Grid computing is a technology without a cause right now. It's preposterous to think that the average joe, or even the average joe company, will have any use for grid computing in the forseeable future. Most of us can't keep our load average above 0.1 (that's 10% for you Windows-users) doing anything useful as it is!

    Heck, look back over the grid computing stories we've seen here on /. Whose name keeps popping up?

    1. Re:Read between the hype.. by pavera · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This is a funny post.
      I think I remember hearing lots of similar sentiment about the internet in 94-95. "What email? what's that for? who needs it who will ever us that?". "Chat rooms? What a waste of time." (precursor to IM, still arguably a waste of time, but I know it saves the company I work for thousands in phone bills, and many hours in productivity). When people walk out and make claims like this, it is a big sign that what they are claiming is useless is probably the NBT

    2. Re:Read between the hype.. by cranos · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Let me guess, you thought 640k was all anyone would need? Or maybe there would only be a market for 5 computers in the world.

      Grid Computing will find its reason, whether its sooner or later who knows, but dismissing it out of hand is short sighted to say the least.

  4. Premature reorts of the grid's demise... by jfabermit · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I really think the people complaining about not personally having a use for grid computing are completely missing the point. As long as enough people have a use for it, it will be useful. Having done a good number of calculations on a few different supercomputers, I can think of nothing that the grid currently offers to me...but I'm sure the people who run many-hundred processor jobs on a regular basis have a different perspective. For a while, the grid might be the plaything of big scientific and industrial computational projects, but has any technological advancement like this ever not caught on. Eventually, someone will figure out a new idea, only possible on a grid, which involves porn, gaming, or the ability to transfer media files in a manner of questionable legality, and soon kids will be asking what life was like without it back in the dark ages. A little patience, people, give the geniuses and madmen (not necessarily mutually exclusive) a little time to work...

  5. Re:Just a question by trozan_007 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The stuff which makes a "grid" different from a cluster is that the computing and job execution typically spans multiple heterogeneous admin domains.