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

Blackout 2003

[Ced_Ex]

Hasn't the blackout taught us to move away from GRID type setups? If people just created their own power the blackout would have affected us less. Could this principle not be used for home computing? Rely on yourself and not on others?

Great until everyone needs cycles at the same time

[G4from128k]

Grids are great for non-time critical computations tasks. But what happens when everyone needs cycles now! My guess is that systems will evolve to give cycles to the highest bidder/highest priority. In such an environment, low-priority tasks will become effectively impossible on a grid - there will always be some higher-priority/higher-paying task that usurps the cycles.

I wonder how long SETI@home will last if home PC users realize they can "sell" cycles to meet for-pay demand for computational power.

Re:HPC for very specialized problems, maybe.

[magefile]

Maybe it's less efficient (as in your chess example), but the amount available may be able to compensate for it. If your grid is only 60% as efficient as your supercomputer, but you have three times the power (#'s pulled out of the air), then grid is still beneficial.

Re:X-Grid

[Red Leader.]

What on earth are you bothering with X-grid for?

You have the in-house developed Condor that's amazing!

Re:Grid: loaded word

[DeepRedux]

The use of the word "grid" here is in the sense of an electric power grid. The idea is that you should get computing power on demand, just like you get electic power on demand.

Depends on how you utilize it.

[jd]

Personally, the way I'd design a high-performance computer is to set up a grid of clusters. Keep things local to a cluster that involve high I/O throughput, and farm out to another cluster anything where the I/O is less important.

The reason for such an arrangement is that high-speed interconnects are expensive. Building a single cluster that is uniformly very high performance would be horrible for anyone other than a very rich organization to consider.

On the other hand, grids alone are way too slow to handle the needs of time-critical communication, which is what you have a lot of the time in parallel computing.

A hybrid, able to place components of a problem according to that component's needs, would seem to be the logical solution. It is also the scalable solution. Clusters often have an upper limit in size. By having grids of clusters, you have a virtually infinite capacity. True, there simply aren't any clusters that have reached the upper limit. Yet. But it's getting tough at the size they are at right now.