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GGF and Grid Security

Posted by Hemos on from the watching-the-machines-that-watch-us dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Things are changing fast in the grid community. Our communication networks connect millions of systems and billions of individuals on the planet. These myriad systems, and the data they contain, present juicy targets for those who want to steal, damage, corrupt, or otherwise gain unlawful access to those systems."

3 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It has been some time........ by millahtime · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Military has also been doing it for some time. To communicate with subcontractors, to communicate with it's other sites. They are another big organization that has been doing it for many years.

    --
    Evolution or ID?
  2. Re:Security challenges with grid computing by Xpilot · · Score: 2, Informative

    The problem is that if you give free resources to a large anonymous community, it takes only a few of those people to suck up all the resources.

    That's why the people who are developing big grid projects are not giving free resources to anonymous users. These grids are the combined resources of all all the colloborators, and have controlled access to the resource pool.

    --
    "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
  3. Re:Mod parent up - there is no "grid computing" by rpeppe · · Score: 2, Informative
    I agree there's loads of hype around grid computing, but I think there are some interesting problems there. It's not really the same as dedicated clustering, because often (usually?) the cluster is not dedicated. A "grid network" often consists of a scattered set of heterogeneous machines over multiple networks, controlled by many people.

    The real task is to transform that sprawling, unreliable beast into something that provides some sort of useful, dependable resource. Machines will be switched off, programs will crash or hang unexpectedly, people will write malicious apps, and through all of that, there is still the possibility of getting some useful work done.

    In my personal view, the real failing of the "Grid Computing community" is to try to solve too many problems at once. But what the heck, it gets lots of papers published.

    If "grid computing" were saleable, ISPs would be offering off-peak compute time on their server farms, and people would be buying it. They're not.

    Most people don't have problems that are suitable for grid compute-farm processing, particularly over WANs. Most companies that do have such problems wouldn't want to make the data that's being processed available to arbitrary client nodes. Neither of these things mean that grid computing is dead.