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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?"

3 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. 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
  2. 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.

  3. 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