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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?"
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.
Most of these projects allow you to join teams and obtain stats based on your computer's performance and the performance of your team as a whole. The collection of these stats seems to be a successful method of motivating and rewarding the participants and best of all it takes minimal time, effort and almost no other resources away from the main project.
Please do not let scientific accuracy interfere with the intended humourous/interesting/insightful value of this comment
Grid computing is not the same thing as distributed computing. You are talking about distributed computing.
Here is a pdf describing what grid computing is.
With the ever increasing energy prices and power consumption of CPUs it might make sense to develop a electric heating apparatus (a radiator) that, instead of resistors, contains 32 *iums or *ons inside for a 'cool' 3KW of heating power.
Link them to a fast internet connection, pay a fraction of the heatees' power bills and you're in business for CPU intensive, network extensive grid applications.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
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.
Sam
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.
What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses?
:D
A new microsoft exploit
Did you forget to mention distributed.net ? ... OGR, DES, RC5, CSC ... dare I say the biggest one ever, except for the ueber-d.net-geeks who had to choose SETI. :)
They have been doing this for years
terpmotors.com
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.Find free books.
Most modern CPUs no longer "waste" spare CPU cycles like they once did.
:-) (I know, true and not true at the same time)
If your CPU runs at 100%, you are using more power and therefore makes your electric bill increase. Therefore, when you run distributed applications, you are actually paying $$$ for what you are giving away.
In recent history, laptop CPUs have started throttling themselves and using even less power, and desktop CPUs will start doing the same before long.
Not that this has that much to do with grid computing...
Grid computings goal is usually greater utilization of your own resources...distriuted computing usually utilizes someone elses resources.
zoglmannk asked:
Grid computing is not aimed at "the masses". Most of the research is concentrating on building systems for solving problems which normal people have no interest in.
That's not to say that we plebs won't benefit from a "cure for X" or "lower oil prices due to better flow models within pipelines" or even "more efficient cars desgined in simulated air tunnels"; we are just very unlikely to be the imediate user of the computing power.
boakes.org
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.