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TeraGrid v. Distributed Computing

Posted by timothy on from the lots-of-pieces dept.

Nevyan writes "After three years of development and nearly a hundred million dollars the TeraGrid has been running at or above most peoples expectations for such a daunting project. On January 23, 2004 the system came online and provided 4.5 teraflops of computing power to scientists across the country. However, the waiting list for TeraGrid is long, including a bidding process through the National Science Foundations (NSF's) Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) and many scientists with little funding but bright ideas are being left behind. While the list of supercomputer sites and peak power is growing how is the world of Distributed Computing faring? "

6 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Looks good to me by DruidBob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There have been big projects like SETI@home, Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, RC5-64 and many others.

    There are some like the Casino-21 http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/ and Evolution-at-Home http://www.evolutionary-research.org/ too.

    It's becoming easier to create the required code for distributed projects, and it most certanly has become easier to actaully get them distributed.

  2. Payment for Work Units by Iesus_Christus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The idea of payment for work units is interesting. While it would certainly provide incentive for participating in distributed computing projects, I can see two problems with it already:

    1) Getting the money to pay people. One advantage of distributed computing is that you don't have to pay for time on expensive cluster. That advantage disappears when you pay distributed computing users. Of course, it may still turn out to be cheaper, and there may be users willing to participate for free.

    2) Botnets and profit. We all know of spammers using zombies to peddle goods, and of script kiddies using them to DDoS. What if some enterprising but immoral person decided to use the computing power of his zombies to profit off of the distributed computing payments? With enough zombies, he could easily make a good amount of money off of other people's computers.

    1. Re:Payment for Work Units by Caseylite · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Another way to pay people would be to offer incentives such as allowing me to write off your process time (wear and tear on my system) as a charitable donation to your non-profit group. ~Casey

  3. Re:My Personal Vision by billstr78 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    IBM is already making that vision a realization.

    They are in beta stages of a massive computation cycle for hire program that will allow organizations without the funding for an entire cluster to purchase cycles provided by a large IBM Power cluster.

    It will allow for a computation cycle market to eventually arise, much like the wheat, corn or gold markets. Companies will compete to provide cheaper cycles, small-time scientists around the world will be able to have thier computation intensive problems solved at a fraction of the current cost possible today.

  4. Re:Access and Denial by Seanasy · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The problem with large projects like TeraGrid, EarthSimulator and other supercomputer sites is that the underfunded _brilliant_ ideas are left behind by those who can afford to pay for or build these centers and sites.

    What are you talking about? These are publically funded resources. You apply to the NSF for time on these machines. If you're at a U.S. institution and you have a real need for supercomputing you can get time on these machines.

    While TeraGrid is a powerfool tool it is one that thousands of scientists and laboratories are standing in line to use. Meanwhile Distributed Computing is available, cheap and relatively quick.

    And Distributed Computing can't even begin to solve some of the problems that supercomputers are designed to address.

    While it may look good on your project to say you used a IBM BlueGENE or DeepComp 6800 is it really worth the extra cost and waiting in line for your chance to use?

    Yes. When you want to simulate every molecule of a proteing in a water solution (~17000 atoms worth) you need a supercomputer. DC can't do it.

    True Distributed Computing is the way to go and shows positive results. Now we just need to tinker with it some more!

    DC is neither a religion nor a panacea.

  5. Re:Distributed Computing by Alkonaut · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Why aren't websites sponsored by applets doing distributed tasks? I'm thinking mainly websites with huge numbers of visitors, where visitors tend to stay long enough to do any meaningful work. (Like GMail for example). Most people don't use more than 5% of computing power when surfing the web, and an applet is safe and easily distributed.

    Personally, I'd much rather have an applet using 10% of my cpu power instead of an annoying flash banner (which probly itself uses 10% cpu...).

    Obviously someone has to pay for internet content, and that to me would be the least intrusive way. Popup-blockers will be inefficient by the end of the year. Ads will be inside the site content. Or worse still, the popup window is the main window, while the actual content is spawned as "pop under" meaning that if you have a popup stopper, all you get is the ad window...

    Cpu cycles is the perfect internet currency. Everyone who visits a website has them.