Visions Of The Future Of Grid Computing

CaptianGrid writes "Computing grids, or software engines that pool together and manage resources from isolated systems to form a new type of low-cost supercomputer, have finally come of age. BetaNews sat down with some of the world's leading grid gurus to discuss the significance of such distributed technologies and separate grid hype from grid reality."

Comments

X-Grid

[qwertphobia]

Check out Apple's X-Grid technology!

It runs on any OSX system, 10.2.8 and up. Put your spare cycles to work.

Xgrid: High Performance Computing for the Rest of Us

Plan 9 & Inferno

[HyperChicken]

If you want examples of operating systems that help with gridding, check out Plan 9 from Bell Labs and it's sister project Inferno. Nice thing about Inferno is that it runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Plan 9, and on native hardware.

HPC for very specialized problems, maybe.

[Rhys]

If you've got a problem that's trivially parallelizable, then sure grid computing is great! RC5, seti@home, and similar projects can benefit from grid computing (really, that's what grid computing is -- someone else's code able to run on your machine when it's idle and do work).

However, don't even begin to think you'll be solving anything that requires any sort of processor to processor communication. Rocket simulation (our local favorite example here at UIUC) for instance is heavily communication based.

The linpack benchmark that top500 uses also needs a low-latency interconnect to perform really well, so don't expect to see "the grid" sitting up at the #1 supercomputer slot on top500.org anytime soon (or really, ever, unless someone develops FTL networking). Latency on the internet in general (and specifically around the world thru all those switches and latest_slashdot_hot_chick_movie.torrent packets) is nothing near what a supercomputer needs.

Now, there are research groups looking at ways of making communiation delays less of a problem, including the one I was in while I was in grad school. There's a number of ways to do it, but none of them I've seen are going to take on worldwide-network-latency and survive with their performance intact.

Even something as "simple" as chess wants to have a fast interconnect - every node that's gotten stranded working on low-priority (bad move) work is a wasted node you may as well not have.