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Mass Grid Computing Around the Corner?

Posted by Cliff on from the using-your-spare-cycles dept.

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?"

6 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Distributed != Grid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Distributed, Grid and how they differ by basking2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Distributed, Grid and how they differ by Myself · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  3. Check out OGSA by jonasmit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. exploit by lcde · · Score: 4, Funny

    What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses?

    A new microsoft exploit :D

    --
    :%s/teh/the/g
  5. Spare cycles no longer exist.... by decep · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Most modern CPUs no longer "waste" spare CPU cycles like they once did.

    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. :-) (I know, true and not true at the same time)