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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.
please consider setting up Grid Computing section! ...so that I can finally filter it!
Thanks in advance.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
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As a coder who works with things like md5 cracking programs (like the thingy in my sig) and various assundry other programs, I can honestly say: the crackers do NOT need any more processing power!
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Crudely Drawn Games
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.
Insert Signature Here
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?
...that bastard Scott is right?
The network really is the computer?
Where'd I put that mousepad......
"It was the Woodstock of the grid -- everyone not sleeping for three days, running around naked and shagging 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.
no wonder it took so long to develop.
I am a leaf on the wind
It's about time grid computing become of age. I've been waiting to hit that for years.
Sincerely,
A dirty old mainframe
Consensual sex is boring.
We did study on size of infrastructure of Internet for demographic studies and thanks to partners at Stanford, found that Google setup now is bigger than the whole Internet in 1995 in terms of machines and total bandwidths. Grid computing definitely works..
-- Dr. Fu Ling-Yu, Internal Technology Consult; Tongji University, People Republic of China.
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?
SKYNET LIVES!!!!
Tsk tsk...what a blatant example of a violation of DMCA right here on /. This so misrepresents the law-abiding nature of the /. population ;-)
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
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
The computation performed by Seti@Home is what Grid researchers refer to as an "embarassingly parallel".
Among many other things, Grid folks hope to solve problems that aren't quite so amenable to divide-and-conquer. But then they had to go base their protocols on the bloated Web services stack, implying a relatively high granularity per compute unit. So we'll see how well that works out!
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.
I just recently heard that here at Virginia Tech we are getting a (massive?) grid comprised of some of the first dual-processor G5s rolling off the assembly line at Apple. The number of machines? I believe it was in the 1100 range.
Thus, if you like grid computing and want to do some research as a grad student or whatever, this might be the place for you.
If you wanted to do this right now, you could cut a deal with a mid-range ISP. Buy an account on every server for use only during off-peak periods, run standard clustering software, and crunch all night. Run on a server farm with large numbers of identical machines interconnected with massive bandwidth. A true Beowulf cluster application.
Nobody does this. That's an indication there's no market for commercial "grid computing". Clusters, yes; reselling computer time, no.
Remember "push technology"? "Micropayments"? "Grid computing" will go the same way.
As for "peer to peer" systems, bear in mind that without copyright problems, music distribution would be trivial and cheap. Just put each new song out on Netnews. Netnews is far more efficient than any of the peer-to-peer systems. The music industry only generates a few tens of megabytes of new data per day, after all.
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.
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...
I have been watching the developement of one such application: Gled , "a hierarchic server-proxy-client-viewer model written in C++ and offering a mixture of object oriented framework and toolkit" (says the project homepage) and I can say that it looks a lot more like a Quake window to a programmable scene made of very complex object collections, running on multiple systems (and with multiple users) with a GUI to its underlying cluster systems, than a Seti@Home screensaver.
My personal favourites are the autogenerated code, the autogenerated GUI and the object brokering facilities over the clusters.
The trend of Grid and Grid-like cluster computing is, IMHO, going in the direction of better viewing facilities, more interactive software and higher-level interfaces, where the underlying grid can be thought of as a piece of iron, a strange dynamic multiprocessor arhitecture with impossible latencies.
Links:
-Kvorg
The stuff which makes a "grid" different from a cluster is that the computing and job execution typically spans multiple heterogeneous admin domains.
I've been working in the Grid Computing area for the last two and a half years, and would like to make a stand for all of us who aren't just worried about bigger supercomputers.
Supercomputers are great, but the number of big computing problems that can handle being run on distributed groups of supercomputers is small. That's why things such as the Earth Simulator and the ASCI programme still exist - sometimes it's just better to build a bigger box!
Where Grid Computing might take off in the science and business mainstream is collaboration and sharing of resources. In particular, I work on producing middleware to try and share and unify data resources. In the astronomy community for instance, they have spent many years standardising the naming schemes for their databases and as a result, projects such as Skyserver and SkyQuery are becoming possible. Now consider the bioinformatics field: hundreds of competing standards for naming things as simple as gene expression ids. Grid computing should provide some of the tools to make knowledge extraction from the many disparate scientific databases possible.
This has applications in business, and it's something we're already seeing in the uptake of Web Services. One recent Grid Computing initiative - Grid Services - is pushing the boundaries of Web Services, and extending them to standardise functionality such as state and lifetime management which should make them more useful for the kinds of collaborative problems which are cropping up in both business and science.
For instance: a car manufacturer has an agreement with different suppliers of airbags - obviously information exchange must take place to ensure safety of the passengers, but both the car manufacturer and airbag supplier will not necessarily want the other to be able to see all data for their parts, just use it. As suppliers change, the manufacturer must ensure that data is properly traced and expired. This is not much different from scientific collaborations, financial collaborations or even network gaming where we have a huge number of swiftly changing, transient resources.
It is these problems of dynamic collaboration and maintenance of resources that Grid Computing may eventually solve.
Use those unused CPU cycles in the search for disappearing African Uranium!
I don't get it...the man sits around for 9 months and then a woman comes along and poof a baby is born?
(1 woman + 1 man) * 9 months = 1 baby
Order of operations man! Gotta get those parenthesis right.