Mass Grid Computing Around the Corner?

zoglmannk asks: "I've become interested in grid computing. A lot has happened since the last time that I looked at it several years ago during the SETI@home heyday. Now several public supported grid applications are coming to fruit: climate modeling, cancer research, protein folding, smallpox therapies, fighting bioterrorism, mersenne prime search, evolution, SETI, and others. All of these have public interest to make a better world. Is mass adoption of public interest grid computing just around the corner? Is there really a need for a majority of those spare CPU cycles? Or is there more computing power than can reasonably be used for the types of problems that can be distributed to home and educational PCs? What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses? More education, advertisement, prizes, reimbursement?"

Comments

Cluster maybe, in a couple of years

[Kris_J]

I don't know about grid computing, but the little Dell PCs we have in our computer labs will start coming out of lease in a couple of year's time. I know they're "identical" because I manage them with Ghost. I'm seriously tempted to get 10 or so then and try to build my own cluster. They even have Gigabit ethernet built-in. Some cat 6 cable, a 12-port switch, a few powerboards, one master with a screen... I just need something worth doing with them.

Distributed, Grid and how they differ

[basking2]

Most (all?) of the cited examples are ditributed computation projects. Most have agents that call up a server and signout work to do.

The vision of grid computing is to treat computation power like electrical power. Where there is demand, the computation power "flows" and "fills" that demand.

For example, a simple example is that you have a webserver cluster, a database cluster, and a network area storage cluster, all made up of off-of-the-shelf PCs. If demand for database logic goes up and stays up, one of the computers being used for redundant storage could STOP replicating data and START being a database server. If the web requests go up, one of the database computers could stop handling database requests and start handling web requests.

Obviously, there are hard limits that must be met. We must have at least 1 web server, 1 database server, and enough storage machines to keep our data safe. We also have to detect failure or excess load and have a transition path for the generic computer to change what computational task it helps with.

Amazing stuff, and if you ponder the details of it, it is a bit of a challenge!! As another poster mentioned before, this does relate to self-healing technology and it also does relate to the distributed computing projects you mentioned in your post.

Hope this is helpful.

Re:Distributed, Grid and how they differ

[Myself]

And I was just about to make a post suggesting that we optimize communications to make the bandwidth consumption of these projects easier to manage.

Most folks try to live near their jobs, or at least in the same state. If one spare cycle is the same as another spare cycle, why not have everyone in a particular geographic area work on the project whose servers are in that area? Then if a new project pops up, or if a grid computing task comes along, nearby resources could simply be reassigned.

A universal client, which would run whatever cycle-sucker was appropriate, could make this easy.

Check out OGSA

[jonasmit]

I agree with what others have said Grid Computing is distinct from other forms of distributed computing.
Check out OGSA - the Open Grid Services Architecture - and learn what is and is not a Grid. This is the de facto standard for building Grids.
Even new products that are *sold* with Grid in their title aren't necessarly THE GRID though they might be A GRID.

distributed.net ?

[scythian]

Did you forget to mention distributed.net ?
They have been doing this for years ... OGR, DES, RC5, CSC ... dare I say the biggest one ever, except for the ueber-d.net-geeks who had to choose SETI. :)

money

[bcrowell]

I expect that fairly soon there will be an efficient market for CPU cycles. That might help to offset the cost of a new machine, but it will also probably have the effect of killing off the donation-based projects like SETI@home.

Is there really a need for a majority of those spare CPU cycles? Or is there more computing power than can reasonably be used for the types of problems that can be distributed to home and educational PCs?
It doesn't take much creativity to think of ways you could use up ridiculously large amounts of cpu power. In the relatively near future, I can imagine:

• spammers paying people to compute hashcash postage
• online gamers paying for rendering of Pixar-quality animation

For the more distant future, a lot of really difficult AI problems might become more tractable if you could throw enough CPU power at them. Neurobiologists can already simulate the nervous systems of very simply organisms; maybe at some point it will become possible to simulate a human brain directly.

Costs beyond electricity?

[SecState]

Slightly off-topic, but I've long wondered whether running one of these programs decreases the lifespan of a computer. Do the excess heat and months of constant usage take a toll on the processor and other components? My P3/900 laptop, for one, sure gets hot when I run Folding@Home.