Grid Computes 420 Years Worth of Data in 4 Months

Da Massive writes with a ComputerWorld article about a grid computing approach to the malaria disease. By running the problem across 5,000 computer for a total of four months, the WISDOM project analyzed some 80,000 drug compounds every hour. The search for new drug compounds is normally a time-intensive process, but the grid approach did the work of 420 years of computation in just 16 weeks. Individuals in over 25 countries participated. " All computers ran open source grid software, gLite, which allowed them to access central grid storage elements which were installed on Linux machines located in several countries worldwide. Besides being collected and saved in storage elements, data was also analyzed separately with meaningful results stored in a relational database. The database was installed on a separate Linux machine, to allow scientists to more easily analyze and select useful compounds." Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?

Comments

Malaria?

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like a waste of computing resources to me. How many people do you know with malaria? Cancer is far more prevelant.

Re:Malaria?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can kill malaria with poisons/pesticides and by changing the ecosystem, so in this sense it's preventable. Some cancers are preventable (lung cancer), while others not so easily.

Re:Malaria?

[Anonymous Coward]

But not all lung cancer is preventable. Non smokers can have virus caused cancer in the lungs.

Re:Malaria?

[Soporific]

According to:

http://archive.idrc.ca/books/reports/1996/01-07e.h tml

Malaria kills quite a few people every year so I don't think it's a waste.

~S

Re:Malaria?

[alshithead]

When you consider global warming...malaria WILL become a huge problem for many areas that haven't had to worry about it before now. This is in no way a waste. Buy your quinine now and while you're doing it...buy stock in the companies that manufacture it.

Re:Malaria?

[iminplaya]

Unfortunately, most of the people killed are considered somewhat "less than" human. It goes a long way to explain the lack of interest, while other diseases are more politically expedient. The profit margins just aren't there.

Re:Malaria?

[Anonymous Coward]

you must live in a western nation

Re:Malaria?

[sumdumass]

It isn't somewhat less then human. It is not seeing the need to rush and aid someone who lives near danger on purpose. Especialy when the most effective control has been taken off the market because of enviromental concerns.

I mean, would you really think it is most benificial sending food to starving children living in an area incapable of supporting life (like s desert) over moving them to a place that could?

Re:Malaria?

[Fordiman]

I, ah, though quinine cured malaria...?

Re:Malaria?

[iminplaya]

Actually I'm sure they would love to move to more fertile, profitable areas. Unfortunately, there are others with a different agenda who like to keep them away. Those people are getting much more outside help than the starving kids. Let's not forget the economics of the arms trade with african warlords and corrupt tinpot generals who are, of course, "good for our interests". I'm also aware that basic sanitation and clean water, both cheap and easy to achieve with the right thinking, will take care of probably a full 90% of the problem. Their old traditions are responsible for much of it. The parent's link lead me to this. It has to be just the tip of the iceberg. So the chemical insecticides are not needed. There are far too many unexplored, easily accessable natural solutions.

Outsiders really aren't interested in Africa's problems, unless it interferes with "free trade". This will be solved by the Africans with relatively little outside help. It's just the usual numbers game.

I've heard that gin is a good mosquito repellent.

Re:Malaria?

[iminplaya]

After a little poking around, I found what looks like the stuff they put on the nets. It was under their noses all along. And I would venture to think that the they (the Africans) have known about it for a very long time. I'm too lazy to find out how well it controls these guys, something even more neglected in mass media. Nature triumphs the computer again. Okay, now I'm drifting off topic, but it at least I did it seamlessly and gracefully :-)

Re:Malaria?

[sumdumass]

Well, My piont was that nobody in their right minds think that some people are less then human. They just don't jump at a cause to help them because of various reasons. You pointed out a few good ones too.

As for waiting untill it effects free trade. It is normal for a person to not care much about situations that don't effect them. This isn't anything new or novel. It might not be the best practice to have but it is a reality in life. I really don't see much wrong with it other then it tends to lend the opinion that if you don't think your being heard do something to effect something they care about. But even this is a trivial concern. Most humans get this idea from their parrents who ground them from nitendo or something they think you like to punish you.

Personaly, I have enough troubles running my own life without having to concern myself with someone across an entire ocean that doesn't influence my life at all. And when malaria does effect my life, you bet your bottom dollar that I would use anything to stop it even if it was bad for the enviroment. Why, Because it is that easy to control and rid the risk of it.

Re:Malaria?

[God'sDuck]

quinine cures malaria strains not yet resistant to quinine.

Re:Malaria?

[DonnieD701]

Hey, this stuff kills all kinds of insects... Won't somebody think of the larvae?

Re:Malaria?

[Ambitwistor]

I mean, would you really think it is most benificial sending food to starving children living in an area incapable of supporting life (like s desert) over moving them to a place that could? 1. Deserts aren't incapable of supporting life.
2. Most starving children don't live in places as hostile as deserts.
3. Where would you like to move them? How many tens of millions of refugees would you like to support in your home country, give land to, find jobs for, and so on? If it's not a majority, which other countries would you prefer take on the task of relocating entire nations?
4. In short, have you considered the social, political, and economic implications of a mass relocation project?

Re:Malaria?

[tkdog]

You're a troll. But for the record millions of people have malaria right now, there aren't easy cures especially for certain strains and the economic toll is huge.

Re:Malaria?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I'm concerned about global warming too. But I think you're off base about malaria. Sure, there is a chance that malaria will be more prevalent. However, I think our real resources should be put to combating the animal predators from the North who will want to eat us for lunch.

First, when global warming happens, all the polar bears will come South looking for something to eat. We are probably on the top of their list. First, the bears will be real angry at us because we melted their front yard. And secondly, we happen to be the fattest creatures around--there is a lot of meat on our bones. And don't even get me started on what will happen to our shrubbery when the reindeer head this way.

I think instead of wasting CPU cycles on malaria, we instead should be using those computing resources searching for a safe but effective polar bear repellent. That way we have our priorities straight. Just my 2 cents.

Re:Malaria?

[Karma Vampire]

+5 Insightful, you clueless tools.

Re:Malaria?

[sumdumass]

1. Deserts aren't incapable of supporting life.
2. Most starving children don't live in places as hostile as deserts.
3. Where would you like to move them? How many tens of millions of refugees would you like to support in your home country, give land to, find jobs for, and so on? If it's not a majority, which other countries would you prefer take on the task of relocating entire nations?
4. In short, have you considered the social, political, and economic implications of a mass relocation project?

In short,

1. I didn't claim a deser wasn't uninhabital. I was making the conection of too many people and not enough food in a desert meand is cannot support the life living there.
2. Most starving children aren't actualy starving. They are also victoms of their parents poor choices and the poor choices of the governments over seeing them. But I wasn't talking about the starving children in non hostile enviroments was I? I brought up a specific conditional statment that was asking for the preference of two ideas.
3. You should move them to non hostile places. And you don't need to "give" them anything. They get temporary housing and find their own jobs, use the public education systems just like the other people and become usefull citizens of the new home. Why would you need to give them land, jobs and stuff when they shoudl be capable of doing it on their own?
4. Yep, Even if it is just to another part of the same country. More then likley it will require somewhat of an education campain to help them adjust and anyone refusing to go should be left to fend for themsleves. It is questionable if the children should be taken against their parrents wishes but if they are so young that they couldn't understand the choice then take them.

In a lot of situations, the problem isn't that the land won't support the life living on it, it is more like the life living on it has outnumbered the ability for the land to support it. Takig only a portion of the people away can have a drastic impact on it's ability to be productive and self supportive of those living there. Shipping in food at the expense of others isn't fixing this problem, it is making the people dependent on others. And when something happens to stop the supply of food comming in, it will devestate them.

Re:Malaria?

[Praseodymn]

Worrying about the environment is a luxury. Being able to do something to stop what will probably kill you is a luxury. Living anywhere because you want to is a luxury. Having a choice to take the lucid dream inducing malaria drugs or not is a luxury.

Where malaria flourishes, luxuries are scarce.

Travel as much as you can in your life, preferably to the poorer countries. They are often the happier ones.

Re:Malaria?

[Ambitwistor]

1. I didn't claim a deser wasn't uninhabital. I was making the conection of too many people and not enough food in a desert meand is cannot support the life living there. Starving people in other countries by and large are not living in places where the land cannot support them.

Most starving children aren't actualy starving. All starving children are starving, by definition.

They are also victoms of their parents poor choices and the poor choices of the governments over seeing them. So?

But I wasn't talking about the starving children in non hostile enviroments was I? No. But starving children by and large don't live in places as hostile as deserts, either.

You should move them to non hostile places. Yeah? Where? Your backyard?

And you don't need to "give" them anything. They get temporary housing and find their own jobs, use the public education systems just like the other people and become usefull citizens of the new home. Oh really? Who says that there are enough jobs, homes, etc. in existing countries to meet a huge influx of displaced refugees, considering that they have nonzero unemployment rates even without tons of new immigrants. (You are talking about relocating tens or hundreds of millions of people here, you know. Even the U.S. in its period of unrestricted immigration never dealt with that many.) And which jobs are they going to end up with in this new society? Equal access to employment as native citizens? Witness the fate of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., Muslim immigrants in France, etc. And those are small numbers of immigrants.

Even if it is just to another part of the same country. More then likley it will require somewhat of an education campain to help them adjust and anyone refusing to go should be left to fend for themsleves. It is questionable if the children should be taken against their parrents wishes but if they are so young that they couldn't understand the choice then take them. Yeah, I'm sure you would love a forced relocation program if your government was making you move where it saw fit "for your own good". You are looking less at "fending for themselves" and more at "civil war".

You and Stalin would have gotten along just fine, I think.

In a lot of situations, the problem isn't that the land won't support the life living on it, it is more like the life living on it has outnumbered the ability for the land to support it. It is rarely the case that starvation is due to an intrinsic inability of land to support its population. It has more to do with an economy that can't support modern practices of agriculture and distribution of goods, dictators that don't support their people, and so on.

Re:Malaria?

[sumdumass]

And this is my problem how? I bet if they did things differently this would be a luxiry thay too could afford.

Travel as much as you can in your life, preferably to the poorer countries. They are often the happier ones.

If they are the hapier ones, then why is it my problem.

I already have had this thread modded as flaim and troll for no good reason other then destroying someone's opinion that people think some others are less then human because they don't jump in and help at the first sighn of anything. So i don't mind screwing around with the ideas of how am I supposed to be conected on a way that obligates me to an action and If they are happier and suffering, it seems that their choices have caused the dangers to be present so again, how dows their choices obligate me to anything. Is it because i made other choices and flurish as apposed to their more empoverish but happier life?

Re:Malaria?

[sumdumass]

Dude, don't take this anywere i didn't go with it. If you want to make some personal claim to anything start your own thread and stop trying to read shit that i didn't say into mine. . Take the entire post into context for once. I will reply but if you try to read anything into it tha isn't there again, it will stop just as fast.

Starving people in other countries by and large are not living in places where the land cannot support them.

And I believe I addressed that when I made the statement of them being subject to poor choices of their government and parrents.

All starving children are starving, by definition.

Then the definition isn't being applied properly. I have seen the report of starving kids going to bed hungery and then you find out that they are getting enough nutrition just not enough food to have a snack before going to bed or to gain 20 pounds in a week. This isn't a definition of starving but they are being presented that way.

Yeah? Where? Your backyard?

Most prefereble in there back yard. And then to the back yards of the closest place that resembles their climate and political/geographical reagons. Then spread out from there. If it happens to be my back yard then be it.

Oh really? Who says that there are enough jobs, homes, etc. in existing countries to meet a huge influx of displaced refugees, considering that they have nonzero unemployment rates even without tons of new immigrants. (You are talking about relocating tens or hundreds of millions of people here, you know.

Lol.. You act like that cannot be done. And there being enough jobs is something that will need to be looked at when the movment is happening. And a non zero unemployment rate is normal. There won't be everyone willing to work so there will always be unemployment of some sorts.

Even the U.S. in its period of unrestricted immigration never dealt with that many.) And which jobs are they going to end up with in this new society? Equal access to employment as native citizens? Witness the fate of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., Muslim immigrants in France, etc. And those are small numbers of immigrants.

Quite simple, they will end up with any jobs they are qualified to have and that there is an opening for. Most immigrants in american enjoy equal access to the jobs regular citizens do. Some aren't allowed to work or only allowed to work in certain areas because of their VISA limitations. Barring that, If they speak the language there is no limits outside the normal limits placed in regular citizens.

And what about the ate of the mexican immigrants in the US. The illegal ones do shit jobs that don't pay but hat is because as illegal aliens they don't have the same amounts of recourse a citizen does. If your considering this as immigration then your holding the results of illegal actions as the common asumtion of everyone moving to the country. That is wrong.

As for the muslims in france, lol.. This is more because of how france is run then how immigrants are treated. France has a huge unemployment problem that they aren't likley to fix any time soon. Also, the antage goes, when in rome, do as the romans do. It doesn't aper to be the situation here. I mean bringing the violence in with them doesn't make for a supportive and welcoming society when your moving into it. And lets face it, burning cars and destroying businesses is somethign that the US went though and came out ok. So if anything it will just be a matter of time. But they need to fix some things first that have nothing to do with how immigrants are treated.

Yeah, I'm sure you would love a forced relocation program if your government was making you move where it saw fit "for your own good". You are looking less at "fending for themselves" and more at "civil war".

If they don't want to move

Re:Malaria?

[iminplaya]

Heh, don't be so quick to dismiss the thought :-) Something much worse could arise from the ashes, so to speak.

Re:Malaria?

[iminplaya]

Sorry 'bout the mods. Don't take this wrongly, ok? But what you seem to reflect is very common thinking still. I believe we need to realize there is no other side of the planet anymore. Everything is just around the corner now. We leave a piece of ourselves everywhere we go and we always bring something back. The differences amongst us will dissolve over time. Let's embrace it. Jeeze, I hope that doesn't become a poor excuse of an ad campaign for Burger King or Gap Jeans to take over the whole world now

Re:Malaria?

[iminplaya]

Shipping in food at the expense of others isn't fixing this problem, it is making the people dependent on others.

Very much the intentions of the overseas (for them) merchants. I believe they would be quite self sufficient...if so much of the money simply wasn't being stolen.

Now...Back to the subject at hand. I would use the computers to figure out the next World Series win for the Cubs. Whaddya think? Do we have enough power on the grid? Or will it just cause another Northeast blackout?

Re:Malaria?

[sumdumass]

You know. I don't think the mods are your fault or anything. There is no need o appoligize. I should have known that replying to such a charged statment was a setup in the first place. But It had to happen because nobody in their right mind thinks that some people are less then human. It can be explained away far easier without malice being injected.

But as to what your saying. I don't dissagree at all. But I really don't think it is as much about the differences in "us" as to how someone gets motivated. They usualy don't think twice about something that doesn't effect them in some way. Soon everything will have an impact on everyone and it will make them at least think about it. But when push comes ot shove, More people will be worried about themselves and their families then someone else.

And this self centerness Isn't something that comes lightly. Growing up in the hight of the cold war, we were often instructed to think about "what if" and "how we would survive" a nuclear attack. Often these plans consisted of a fallout shelter somewhere that could only support so many people for so long of a time. We came to grips that we would have to exclude others. My family had/has a underground shelter that originaly would hold 3 families of 5 for 3 weeks. Unfortunatly I am not in that group anymore because I'm the only sibbling that doesn't have kids. I think they counted two kis as one adult so that why there wasn't a strict number of people. The plan was to goto it in case of emergency but we knew if it was to late we couldn't go in or risk killing everyone else. Decisions like this don't come easy but it takes away some of the sadness when thinking of everyone else. It is a sad reality that we accepted. And when the Y2k didn't hit, we still had a plan for it. Now we have terrorist and the though to biological or chemical warfare and there is still a need to think about this.

Again, I don't think it has anything to do with a difference in culture, race, language, or anything else. I think it is just how we were conditioned to ultimatly think about our own survival before considering someone elses. And when we see how enabling something to happen at the expense of others goes on in our own back yard, We aren't goiong to be as motivated to do so in someone elses. And yes, I'm talking about the welfare state that pays if you have kids but disproportionatly stops when you get a job. But thats getting into another subject.

Re:Malaria?

[iminplaya]

But It had to happen because nobody in their right mind thinks that some people are less then human.

Who said the people running the world are in their right mind? :-) History has shown more than one or two maniacs that were in briefly in charge of things. And yes there is plenty of talk of "barbarians" and "savages" to this day. Anyway the real issue is purely economic. The subject of humanity doesn't come up in the boardroom.

Re:Malaria?

[sumdumass]

Anyway the real issue is purely economic. The subject of humanity doesn't come up in the boardroom.Well, I guess I see the point more clearly now. I was getting ready to claim it isn't the companies part to be saving some african villiage but that examplifies your point. We are talking about using open source computing power to find a cure for a problem that is most prevailent in areas of the world that has little money. And By this means, economics plays a great deal in how something is prioritised.

I was thinking of the sally struthers "for the price of a cup of coffee you can save this child" type programs. But your right, it is econimics and not because anyone is less then human.

Re:Malaria?

[Praseodymn]

the subhuman thread is irrelevant.
Honestly, 'your problem'? No, you're not involved, it has nothing to do with you, and so it's not your problem. But the least you could do is be supportive of general human wellfare around the world. Nothing wrong with offering a voice of support so that those who can might be more willing to help.
As far as your and their 'choices,' neither you nor most of them have anything at all to do with the cultural and social constructs. Most people in SE Asia never made any choices at all about the French and the British coming in in the 17 and 1800s, and very few of them had anything to say in the agricultural projects. Finally, they have little to say about their ancestry, cultural norms and customs. Choice requires opportunity, which doesn't always exist.

Re:Malaria?

[koreaman]

I lived in a desert for the first seventeen years of my life (Phoenix, Arizona) and last I checked it was capable of supporting life.

Re:Malaria?

[Ambitwistor]

And I believe I addressed that when I made the statement of them being subject to poor choices of their government and parrents. You also said that the problem was because the land they lived on could not sustain them. Just because you said something non-stupid along with something stupid, doesn't mean that you didn't say something stupid, so stop accusing me of putting words in your mouth.

Most prefereble in there back yard. And then to the back yards of the closest place that resembles their climate and political/geographical reagons. Then spread out from there. Sure, very convenient. Let other countries take up the burden.

If it happens to be my back yard then be it. Really? You'll give up some of your land?

Somehow these "solutions" don't seem as preferable when it's you who has to bear the burden. And don't even try to claim that there is unlimited free land for refugees to buy with the cushy new jobs they'll be able to get.

Lol.. You act like that cannot be done. And there being enough jobs is something that will need to be looked at when the movment is happening. I don't know which is more appalling, your economics or your politics. No, the free market will not magically create as many jobs as there are people who need them.

The illegal ones do shit jobs that don't pay but hat is because as illegal aliens they don't have the same amounts of recourse a citizen does. I assure you, if we had as many legal immigrants as there are illegal immigrants, they wouldn't be getting jobs as good as the current average citizen's, particularly if we don't get to pick the ones with the best educations but have to take anybody who needs to be relocated.

This is more because of how france is run then how immigrants are treated. Yeah, as if other countries treat immigrants equally. I hope you are not going to claim that America has.

If you dump tons of new immigrants into any country over a relatively short period of time, you will have social unrest and incomplete assimilation. It's easy to see this in America's own past, and that's when America was relatively eager to accept new immigrants. Which countries do you think are going to be eager to accept large new populations from random, say, African nations? Certainly not other African nations.

If they don't want to move, then let them suffer whatever the problems are. It is that simple. Like I said, a very Stalinist viewpoint. The social consequences of depopulating entire nations are far worse to both them and to the other nations purportedly resettling them, which is why nobody has been stupid enough to try your plan.

But suggesting that others are somehow obligated to support them because they didn't make a sound decision is bullshit. Moving to another country is not always the "sound decision" you think it is, and it is far less expensive to support nations as-is than try to eradicate them in a diaspora and re-establish their people inside other countries.

So, How does my ability to get along with someone effect anything in discusion here? It means that you have a Stalinist viewpoint towards population control, and we all saw how well that worked out. Stalin too tried to redistribute the population within his own country, to poor effect.

And you think living there in those condition is a good idea? It's better than your idea, which is economically, politically, socially, and ethically completely unworkable.

gnaa

[Anonymous Coward]

join teh gnaa if u r tootaly a winrar

Excellent

[President_Camacho]

The search for new drug compounds is normally a time-intensive process, but the grid approach did the work of 420 years of computation in just 16 weeks.

Cue the stoners in 5, 4, 3, 2....

Re:Excellent

[Mullen]

It's Friday night and they are too stoned to respond to that setup.

Re:Excellent

[Mr2001]

It's a shame the tagging system doesn't allow numeric tags. I had to tag this story "fourtwenty" instead.

Re:Excellent

[Varun Soundararajan]

The Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe, and Everything == 42 Malarial Drug Research == 420 420 is 419 + 1 (419 - remember Nigeria?) Malarial Drug Research/Answer to Ultimate question = 420/42 = 10 remove 0 from 10 :-) and it is 1 , subtract 1 from 420 and it is 419..... Something is really really fishy...

Re:Excellent

[Varun Soundararajan]

The Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe, and Everything == 42

Malarial Drug Research == 420

420 is 419 + 1 (419 - remember Nigeria?)

Malarial Drug Research/Answer to Ultimate question = 420/42 = 10
  remove 0 from 10 :-) and it is 1 , subtract 1 from 420 and it is 419.....

Something is really really fishy...

----
comment already exceeded retard limit, hence no sig.

Re:Excellent

[UncleTogie]

I am not as think as you stoned I am.

Re:Excellent

[riff420]

I am as stoned as I think you are, and I think you're very stoned, but only because I am.

YEAAAAH.

Re:Excellent

[CommunistHamster]

Numerology: For when you have no real evidence.

Re:Excellent

[TapeCutter]

Love the (non-)sig.

Re:Excellent

[eneville]

I am as stoned as I think you are, and I think you're very stoned, but only because I am.

YEAAAAH. what seems to be the officer problem?

Re:Excellent

[UncleTogie]

what seems to be the officer problem?

No, Hossifer... I an NOT under the affluence of infahol! Now take me drunk, I'm home!

{Side note: I got SO used to saying that phrase that it almost got me arrested for DUI 'til they did the breathalyzer...}

Re:Excellent

[Matt Perry]

Anyone want to explain why the parent is +5 funny? I guess I'm missing something.

Re:Excellent

[myz24]

5, 4, 3....wait...dude...what are we counting for?

Re:Excellent

[amRadioHed]

You are indeed missing something. I'm guessing you never went to college?

Re:Excellent

[Matt Perry]

You are indeed missing something. I'm guessing you never went to college?

I went to college but it was a long time ago. We called those people stoners or pot heads back then. I never hung out with those people so I don't know the lingo.

Wikipedia?

[JonathanR]

It strikes me as strange that something like Wikipedia could not be distributed across user's PCs in more of a peer-to-peer fashion. Surely the web itself could benefit from further decentralisation. This issue bothered me some years ago, when I discovered that my desktop PC at work had about 40Gb of unpartitioned disk space. I often wondered about the sense of running file servers in big organisations, when each user probably has a few tens of gigabytes of unused or unpartitioned disk space. If illicit music and video can be distributed by P2P, why not all information?

Re:Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth is not free. This would just be shifting the cost towards everyone else.

Re:Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how do you propose this important company data is backed up? This creates a bigger problem than it solves, much easier to backup a single file server than 100 separate PCs with data on each one.

Re:Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

because it's really fucking slow compared to a centralised system? it's a dumb ass idea.

Re:Wikipedia?

[MrCoke]

Because Wikipedia contains information, 'facts', figures and data. Place it on P2P and it will be tampered with a lot more then now.

IMO.

Re:Wikipedia?

[TodMinuit]

Because Wikipedia contains information, 'facts', figures and data.

Oh man... That's a good one!

Re:Wikipedia?

[battery111]

I really don't think tampering is much of an issue since people can freely edit facts and figures in wikipedia anytime they want anyway. However, the previous concerns about speed and bandwidth costs are valid points. As for corporate fileservers. aside from the backup issues mentioned previously, there is also the issue of ensuring everyone sees the same thing. It's much easier, say, with software, to have all the software stored centrally and have all computers get their software from this one place. Makes updates much easier, and ensures version consistancy across the enterprise. I don't remember where it was, probably slashdot, a few weeks ago when it was mentioned that there is a movement back towards dumb terminals. Reasons being cost (terminals are much cheaper than PC's), and ease of management. P

Re:Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://freenetproject.org/

Anonymous, peer-to-peer information net.

Re:Wikipedia?

[Jessta]

Yes, wikipedia could be decentralised. But between different web servers in data centres not to people's desktop computers.
I would find it really annoying that the particular data I wanted was on your computer and your computer wasn't on or was infested with malware because you don't know how to properly administer you computer.

The main reason for having central file servers are:
1. Backups - By storing all the data in a central location it's much easier to make sure that all data is properly backed up
2. Security - By storing all the data in a central location it's much easier to restrict access to only authorised users.
3. Availability - It's easier/cheaper to implement system to maintain high availability(RAID, UPS, fall over systems) of data on a centralised system.

40GB is so cheap that it's not worth the effort to utilise.

Re:Wikipedia?

[Fordiman]

The system would be designed for it.

P2P isn't a good model, but I can think of one:
Data, as it is created, is stored in the users' shared folder. As other users go to access it, a copy is made from the cloud (as long as filename/size/hashes match) and that copy is used so long as the creator's copy hasn't been modified. When writes are done, they're done locally, and a patch is sent to the original copy. If the creator can't be contacted, or his copy doesn't exist, the last-writer becomes 'creator'. The file's creator is identified by his DC user name.

Backing up is simple. For every creation/update that is made, a patch is queued or sent to a backup server. The server ONLY queues the originals and patches, so that past-versions are accessible. As space becomes unavailable (say, below 10%), the backup server alerts the IT guys that it needs to offload some stuff, and condenses changes of the oldest files in the local copy. When a delete is made, that is considered a write and handled accordingly.

In the event of a reinstall (ie: the local copy of the files are deleted, but the world hasn't been notified), the user, upon connection would query the backup server to see where his stuff has gone, and get it back.

One could create this system to act like an SMB share, with access levels and program-independent drive/directory mapping, but with one added benefit: user-creation and auto-mapping. The DC would automatically tell the system which peer-shares are available to him upon login. The user can then filter out what he needs as he uses it, but can index-search it all (a query is sent to the backup server, which, like a good little machine, has been indexing as backups are made).

Lastly, for reverse compatibility, the backup server could provide SMB access to its copies, ensuring that non-updated systems can still access their stuff.

I don't know about most organizations, but I work at Penn, and a system like this could work admirably.

Re:Wikipedia?

[mollymoo]

1 and 3 come down to having multiple nodes and copies of the data, which is trivial for a distributed network. The security thing can be dealth with using existing crypto stuff - hashes for integrity of it's no sensetive, encryption if it is sensetive. 40GB may be cheap, but 400TB (a mere 10 000 users) isn't so cheap.

Re:Wikipedia?

[elchuppa]

Well this is an excellent question. Actually Van Jacobson is on google video with a presentation on this precise pet peeve of yours. The main concern I have with the idea, at least with how Van Jacobson presents it is that with information addressed by content rather than location, it's slightly more challenging to locate it. At least with the IP system you can route closer towards your destination at each hop up and then down... But data without an authoritative source is basically lost. If you don't have it, you don't really have any reason to inquire about it with any one node over any other. There is a space for peer to peer data systems, and he does have a point over those live media feeds getting saturated. The truth is that all data should be potentially torrented. That's why bittorrent may be one of the most fascinating and potentially effective inventions in the modern(internet) software era (last 10 years). Bugger. so I don't have much constructive to say what with my current state of mind, except that most of the other replies are rudely and stupidly dismissive of the idea. It both resonates and feels like the future, but it's not a trivial problem. Actually it most certainly is... it's just a matter of stating it so that it is trivial.

Re:Wikipedia?

[ikkonoishi]

Overhead mostly. Also there is a good chance of important data being lost when one of the computers holding part of a critical application goes offline. Sure you could add redundancy, and rate the importance of certain things so they would go to dedicated systems, but then you have even more overhead.

Re:Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you don't have to completely decentralize everything, you just need to reduce wikipedia's bandwidth needs.

The idea would be that for each request to wikipedia.org, instead of receiving HTML and pictures you receive URLs on some random guy's computer and md5sums (or sha-1) of the files. On your endpoint, if the downloaded material doesn't match the md5sum, your client can ask wikipedia.org again, and receive new random URLs which, hopefully this time, aren't dead links or haven't been tampered with.

Re:Wikipedia?

[ToasterMonkey]

Ok, I've read one too many comments here suggesting data redundancy and/or integrity >= backups. While backups can be implemented many different ways, an integral part of a good backup solution is the ability to do point in time restores. I imagine that would be pretty damned important to a site who's content is abused as frequently as wikipedia's. Please keep that in mind while you're all dreaming fantasies of distributing the internet's data across your harddrives.

Re:Wikipedia?

[JasonTik]

Wikipedia is constantly changing. Keeping enough computers to handle the loald of the page and not randomly vanish synced in real time, with any significant edit rate will be a rather complex system. While it can be done, you would then need a special program to view Wikipedia. That would lose it many many users. If you don't need that software, you still need a central point to bridge from normal www to whatever system you are using, defeating the purpose.

Another issue is that then there will be no way of stopping all those annoying people from creating malicious nodes to edit pages that might otherwise be locked, and secure administration would be a nightmare.

Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[zappepcs]

If the grid solution finds THE cure for H5N1, will it be patentable? If not, who pays for the R&D to implement it? Who gets the patent? Do the thousands of people who allowed their PCs to be used get anything? Will big drug companies be able to use this and keep the prices low for the final product?

Re:Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[Dr. Spork]

These are all good questions, and every user who volunteers their computer for something like this should find answers to them. I'm quite sure that the stuff discovered by distributed networks does not automatically enter the public domain, but in cases like SETI and protein folding, the organizers explicitly state that it will. But it wouldn't be illegal for a drug company to use volunteers' computers just for corporate profit. You have to judge the merit of each of these projects on a case-by-case basis. Remember also that there is a cost to participating: you have to run your computer at peak power, and this will add several hundred dollars to your utility bills each year while polluting the planet with extra coal smoke and CO2.

Re:Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[iminplaya]

Will big drug companies be able to use this and keep the prices low for the final product?

And people accuse me of living in a fantasy world...

Re:Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[Crazy Gilmore]

I think you are confusing grids with distributed peer-to-peer computing networks. Grids are formed of (usually) clusters of nodes, usually running Linux. They are designed for problems that require massive amounts of computation, often involving multiple cooperation nodes running in parallel, and normally amounts of data so large that it is simpler to send the programs to a cluster near the data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing Shared processing systems a la seti or BOINC are loosely coupled systems where a modest amount of CPU power running a fairly small set of data is contributed to a larger project. In a grid system the users are normally researchers at universities or research institutions and the ownership of the IP is fairly clear.

Re:Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[edschurr]

I don't see why people are very concerned about the patents. Yeah, I want cheaper medicine, but expensive medicine is still better than no medicine at all. My CPU is wasting many cycles, and I suspect the electricity won't cost much (although I have to look into that). Then again, maybe our CPU time is valuable enough that the pharma companies would rather give up the patent than give up the time. I doubt it. The alternative might be Universities.

Re:Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[Mutatis Mutandis]

What the grid computing will have produced is likely to be a set of predicted structure-activity relationships (SARs), i.e. calculations that say that molecules of a certain shape and with a certain charge distribution might be active. You can patent a group of molecules for a certain disease, so I guess that this would be patentable. (Who gets the patent is not actually that important. Licenses have been invented to solve that problem.) However, if you want to have a claim that stands up to some contest, you would better also demonstrate activity in the real world. Lots of people in the business are very skeptical about in silico drug discovery, and not without reason. The art is still in its infancy.

The gorilla in the room is the harsh reality that a SAR is not a drug. Lots of potentially interesting compounds will have too toxic side effects, will simply not be soluble enough in water, or fail to be taken up by the gut, or are quickly eliminated by the liver. Finding a drug that is effective and safe is much more complicated than finding a chemical structure that interacts with some protein. So, before you jump in the air with joy because malaria is finally eliminated, please wait another ten years.

Fast computational generation of hits is a nice idea, and great if it works, but this discovery step would normally be the fastest in the process anyway, and the cheapest. (Which does not mean that it is cheap, it is just less ghastly expensive than the rest.) So, although very interesting, this is not the quantum leap forward that we need to produce much cheaper drugs. It might actually be more useful if we were able to do good in silico toxicology and metabolism studies, but this requires one to construct a computer model of a human being, which is a rather more complex problem.

Re:Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[tkdog]

This is offtopic, but. H5N1 aka "bird flu" - the problem isn't finding a cure. We can and do make effective influenza vaccines all the time. The problem is that if or when a strain with a high mortality rate that is also easily spread presents itself we likely won't have time to make enough vaccine - or effective antivirals (which we can also already make) and distribute them to everyone that needs them. So millions of people get sick and some percentage die mostly because the health care system has collapsed under the weight of the pandemic. That's what the concern is.

Re:Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[bunratty]

Will big drug companies be able to use this and keep the prices low for the final product?

No. The main expense in developing a new drug is doing the pre-clinical and clinical trials to prove the drug is safe and effective and to determine the proper dosage. That requires patients, doctors, nurses, hospitals, research scientists, and so on, over a period of many years. Paying for all of those people to do the work costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Re:Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

That this comment is still unmoderated a day later is why I've largely given up on reading science stories here.

years of computation?

[convolvatron]

sorry, i missed that definition. what is that in library of congresses per human hair?

Re:years of computation?

[Anonymous Coward]

42.

Wow, 25% scalability! Amazing!

[Saint Stephen]

(420 years / 16 weeks) / 5000 computers = 1:4 scalability!!!

Frickin amazing! No one's EVER done that before.

I've got one...

[cultrhetor]

how abouutt a drog thet maks slshdaughters spel gooder and youze gooderest grammer?

Re:I've got one...

[alshithead]

I me know understandk youse repli. Cangst youse spik eenglishk forun us wes be dats spik eenglisk? :)

Re:I've got one...

[stinerman]

Christ, just put the puppy down for a few seconds.

Re:I've got one...

[alshithead]

floopleborp :)

Re:I've got one...

[UncleTogie]

TO quote Dolton Edwards' story, Meihem In Ce Klasrum:

"Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cat his drims fainali keim tru."

Re:I've got one...

[Killjoy_NL]

Bravo, best new word of the day :D

Here's one

[realmolo]

Would it be possible to use all that computing power to make an electronic voting machine that works?

Oh wait! How about a voting machine based on "quantum computing"! Then we wouldn't even have to vote, the machine would already know who won.

Goddamn liberal qubits! Bunch of flip-floppers!

Stupid conservative qubits! They think that there is ONE and ONLY ONE answer for everything!

Re:Here's one

[iminplaya]

Then we wouldn't even have to vote, the machine would already know who won.

That's a no-go. Reading the result will change them. Kinda like what happened in Florida :-) Proof that you can do quantum processing with pencil and paper without all these electronical contraptions.

Re:Here's one

[ThatsNotPudding]

"Reading the result will change them." Heisenberg for President!

From the Article

[imstanny]

Up to 5,000 computers were used at any one time, generating a total of 2,000GB of useful data.

Based on the size of useful data GRID collected from 5,000+ machines and the quantity of pornography on my computer, they are claiming that: porn != useful.
...GRID computing; you disappoint me.

Mathematicians and computers scientists unite!

[cowscows]

In an amazing breakthrough which will no doubt have profound implications on Moore's Law, it has been discovered that multiple computers can accomplish in a shorter time what would take much longer on a single computer! Researchers will next launch a study to see how much faster 6000 video ipods working simultaneously can play through all the songs on the iTMS compared to a single first generation ipod shuffle.

The next Shakespear?

[hack slash]

Perhaps if enough PCs were put to the task they could create new Shakespearean masterpieces. 64bit Night and all that.

Re:The next Shakespear?

[Illogical Spock]

Oh, yeah! To bit or not to bit, that's the question!

Re:Wow, 25% scalability! Amazing!

[Bob54321]

I don't know - the Mozix cluster at work achieves about the same efficiency... I.T. won't listen that there is something incredibly wrong as I employed as a statistician so obviously know nothing about computers!

Gerrymandering

[Teresita]

Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?

Using distributed computing to find molecular cures or the shape a protein will fold into as it comes out of the business end of a ribosome is all well and good, but if you can find a shape on the political map that concentrates all left-wingers into little ghetto-districts and gives solid 55% majorities to right-wingers across all the other ones, and you can deliver this IT solution around the time of the 2010 reapportionment, the Bush Administration has a no-bid contract with your name on it.

Re:Gerrymandering

[alshithead]

"Using distributed computing to find molecular cures or the shape a protein will fold into as it comes out of the business end of a ribosome is all well and good, but if you can find a shape on the political map that concentrates all left-wingers into little ghetto-districts and gives solid 55% majorities to right-wingers across all the other ones, and you can deliver this IT solution around the time of the 2010 reapportionment, the Bush Administration has a no-bid contract with your name on it."

Did you have to go to politics with this? We all know that G.W. is a moron and only a shade of intelligence compared to his father. Republicans suck, Democrats suck, and Libertarians don't suck as bad only because they can hardly get elected. The US (and most other countries) are ruled by the few that have the wealth. Corporate welfare rules. No one who can make a difference gives a shit about the environment or global warming and we are all going to hell in hand basket. The ones who do care can't make a difference unless they sell their souls in order to get elected. How the hell does politics come into your equation for this story?

Re:Gerrymandering

[sumdumass]

lol.. gerymandering has been around since almost the beginging of politics in the US. Why would the bush administration need what it already has? Besides, they don't partition the political boundries, the states do.

And it seems to be the democrats working to groups all the liberal leftwingers into the same district. Of course this is probably an unintended reaction to keeping people dependent on social programs that hand out instead of help up. You may wonder why an imbecile Like bush won the elections instead of the democrats. After you exhaust all you resources consider this, The one side attempts to place alarge portion of the population into a dependency to keep them loyal to keeping them in power. The other side has been able to show this to get into power. You can figure who fits wich side on your own.

5,000 Computers

[iminplaya]

Up to a full megawatt or more for sixteen weeks. How much does that cost where you live? Still, it's a great bang for the buck. So how long would it take with a beowolf cluster of these?

This is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

4/20 is the birthday of Adolf Hitler. Therefore, this is very evil.

Plus, 4+20-1 is 23. ((4*20)-11)/3 is also 23. More proof of it's evilness.

Re:This is evil

[Headcase88]

23 isn't evil. Twenty-three is number one.

Re:This is evil

[kurzweilfreak]

O RLY?

Re:This is evil

[kurzweilfreak]

Dammit, it was supposed to include this link. I fail it for not previewing. :-l

Re:Excellent, I'll Drink to that!

[SubliminalVortex]

I'll take a Gin and Tonic (with Quinine, of course).

Are there any other 'big picture' problems...

[Anonymous Coward]

out there?

Yes. For example, how did a carpetbagging bitch who murdered her accountant get to be the senator of New York and the leading Democratic presidential candidate?

Lots of things still out there

[Raul654]

(Preface - My research group specializes in parallel computing) There are classes of problems so computationally intensive that the computers that can do them in a reasonable amount of time won't be invented for decades. Almost all of these are simulations of physical reactions (invitro drug simulation, climate simulation, biomolecular engineering sims, physics sims, 'etc). As a general rule, these problems scale weakly (meaning that as you add more computers, you can simulate more datapoints, and get more accurate results). If memory serves, the hardest problem I can recall involved hydrogen fusion simulations, requiring computers 10-1000 times faster than the best in the world today.

How about open source, distributed search

[classh_2005]

This looks interesting:

http://www.majestic12.co.uk/

I think

[ryepnt]

I think that a lot of the world's problems could be solved like this; the downside of course being that some guy in an island would have to sit underground and insert 4 8 15 16 32 43 over and over. (prays someone who kept up with the lost experience read that and understood) ha

Re:Wow, 25% scalability! Amazing!

[TodMinuit]

That 420 was based on some benchmark. Perhaps a 1GHz Pentium or something. Perhaps the average CPU on the grid was higher.

the biggest issue

[battery111]

You know, I think the thing that aggravates me the most is that these distributed computing systems are helping drug companies find cures to illnesses using OUR processing power and computers WE paid for, only to sell us the drug that they would have been hard pressed to develop without our hardware back to us at an extremely inflated price.

Re:the biggest issue

[dvice_null]

If you have for example cancer and a drug company is making money for providing you the cure for it. You really don't care how they got it, as long as you are able to pay for the drug. It is better to have expensive drug rather than not having it at all. You are not forced to participate.

But there is of course a better solution also. Drug research could be funded by goverments, with tax money. This would allow cheap drugs and all the research data could be public, which would speed up the research a lot, assuming that same amount of money would be used. Or the other way around, the same amount of research could be archieved with smaller amount of money. Free is always better than closed.

Re:the biggest issue

[scottv67]

You know, I think the thing that aggravates me the most is that these distributed computing systems are helping drug companies find cures to illnesses using OUR processing power and computers WE paid for, only to sell us the drug that they would have been hard pressed to develop without our hardware back to us at an extremely inflated price.

Posting a reply to your comment is going to un-do my moderation this morning but I can't let your comment go by without a response. Yes, we (people who run the distributed computing clients on our home PCs) are contributing OUR resources to large pharmaceutical companies (directly or indirectly). I am running the F@H client on multiple PCs (at my home) that I bought with my take-home pay. Furthermore, my electric bill is impacted by having those PCs running (my electricity is about $0.03/kwh off-peak) *and* there is an additional cooling load on my home's HVAC system in the summer. Yes, the drug companies are getting something from me without ever acknowledging the money I have invested in helping them produce a new drug. But I don't do it for the recognition or the fame (okay, I do watch the F@H stats to see how many points I am producing each week compared to the other contributors on my F@H team) but instead I do it for the greater good. Is it possible that a company like Pfizer will take the results from my F@H clients and create their next blockbuster drug? Yes, it could happen. Will I be pissed if they don't cut me in on the action? No.

Regarding your comment: "only to sell us the drug...at an extremely inflated price." Who really knows what the true price of a drug is? How many millions need to go into the salaries of researchers, sophisticated lab equipment and large facilities to house that stuff? How do you *know* the price of a drug is "extremely inflated"?

If you don't like the distributed computing project like Folding At Home (F@H), please be aware that you don't have to run the software and you can feel quite smug every night when you tuck yourself into bed knowing that all of your home PCs are powered-off. You can even have a little chuckle and say "Suckers! My electric bill won't suffer just to benefit the drug companies!" before you turn out the light. But when the next big life-saving drug comes to market and it turns out that YOU need it to live, feel free to not purchase that drug. Show those evil drug companies that they won't get one penny of your hard-earned money.

Last year, I donated a big chunk (thousands) of my take-home pay to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. While I am not personally afflicted by those diseases nor is anyone in my family, I donated to that organization in the hope that a cure will be found. [My donation was not tax-deductible so I did not make the donation in the hope of reducing the amount of income tax I would pay for 2006.] I run the F@H client on my home PCs for the same reason: Somebody somewhere (maybe someone who hasn't even been born yet) will benefit from my home PCs crunching numbers throughout the night. *I* paid for these PCs, *I* pay for the power to run them, *I* pay for the extra cooling load they generate in the summer. I am doing this in the hope that someone else on the planet will benefit from my "investment".

Re:the biggest issue

[gordgekko]

you can feel quite smug every night

Hello kettle.

Re:Wow, 25% scalability! Amazing!

[jZnat]

Working on generic PCs using idle CPU, that's probably pretty good, right? These aren't dedicated grid computers as far as I can tell.

Re:Wow, 25% scalability! Amazing!

[DeQuincey]

You're glossing over some important points.

1) I'm pretty sure that the servers have to send the same job out to multiple clients. That is, you can't assume that it's sufficient to have only one computer return a result for one job. There's the possibility that the result is incorrect or never returned.

2) The point of grid computing is to reduce both the cost and time required to do the computation. The entire endeavor would be more efficient if you had full control over the entire grid, i.e. a huge cluster. The entire endeavor would also be more expensive. (Last I heard, Sun is having a hard time finding customers for it's grid computing service. It might just be that $1/CPU-hour is too expensive.)

3) Distributed computing of this sort depends on unused CPU cycles. You can't expect 100% CPU utilization out of all 5,000 machines that took part in the project.

So, what you comparing this to arrive at your cynical conclusion?
Did you consider the difference in cost?

Other areas to benefit

[dave562]

Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?

The development of models to find relationships among individuals based upon their phone records, email communications, webpage preferences and other easily recorded and identified identifying tidbits of digital transactional receipts. Of course, I'm sure that there are various three letter agencies already well ahead of me on that one. (High guys!)

Re:Wow, 25% scalability! Amazing!

[nick_davison]

Worse...

It's over 4 months, not a fraction of a second.

If I have a task that takes 100 seconds to run and I want it completed in under a second, scalability becomes a challenge... I have to figure out how to break it in to at least 100 distinct parts and deal with all of the communication lags associated. To have any kind of fault tolerance, I probably want to break it in to at least 1,000 tasks so that if one processor is running fast, it can get fed more and if one processor corrupts its process, I don't find out right at the end of the second, with no room to compensate, that I have to run re-run that full second's worth of processing elsewhere to make up for it. That's where the challenge comes in.

If I have a task that takes 100 seconds to run and all I'm trying to do is run it a lot of times over a period of time that's many times greater, I can run it 864 times a day per system with absolutely no scalability issues whatsoever and simply send the relatively small complete result sets back. With 100 systems, if each one can run a distinct task from start to finish, I'd be expecting pretty much dead on 100 times the total number crunching as there are absolutely no issues with task division, synchronization or network lag.

In this case, they ran 5,000 computers over 4 months. Assuming a single task is solvable in under 4 months by a single system, they should have had no difficult task division problems to solve, absolutely minimal synchronization issues and next to no lag issues to address. In short, even a pretty inefficient programmer should be able to approach 1:1 scalability in that easy of a scenario.

Efficiency of algorithms is a challenge when you want a single result fast. When you want many results and are prepared to wait so long as you're getting very many of them, that's an incredibly easy distributed computing problem.

Grid Computing Projects

[1mck]

I've been donating my processor time for quite awhile now for the Malaria research, and even though the drug companies will probably benefit from my donation, they would not have these breakthroughs if people didn't donate that time, and it is the fact that a breakthrough will be found is what keeps me donating my processor time. It's a great feeling knowing that I've contributed to a possible cure towards this disease! Other projects that could need the services of Grid Computing, I believe that was the original question that was put forth, are imaging analysis (any field), physics (particle research, etc), and I can also see Grid Computing being used also for computer animations where the time to render animations would be greatly reduced, and allowing movies, and shows to be released much faster than before. (With this application, it would be known that you are contributing to a product that a company will be making a profit, and the only reason to do it is get these movies, shows to market faster. I, for one, would love to see a sequel to The Incredibles, and to be a part of that would be fantastic, even to just have my name mentioned in the credits!) One thing that needs to be done for these projects to get the maximum exposure for Grid Computing is to dumb down the process. A Noob would be hard pressed to set up Boinc Manager to do the Malaria research.

Re:Grid Computing Projects

[AlXtreme]

I can also see Grid Computing being used also for computer animations where the time to render animations would be greatly reduced, and allowing movies, and shows to be released much faster than before.

I'm afraid that that will take quite some time to realize. Rendering CG, besides taking a lot of processing time, also requires enormous amounts of data, which restricts the rendering to render farms, the data being pumped over a high-speed LAN.

Actually the amount of problems solvable by using Grid Computing over the internet isn't very high. You need computationally-intensive problems that can be easily parallized, besides requiring limited amounts of data. There's little point in distributing a problem if it takes longer to distribute the data than that you gain by using multiple nodes.

Grid computing vs distributed computing projects

[Crazy Gilmore]

Much of this discussion is totally misdirected because the writers are confusing a distributed computing project like SETI or BOINC - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOINC_client-server_t echnology - with a grid system - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing. They are completely different things.

big deal

[itsmarsh]

Gus Gorman has a patant on this already called the Ultimate Computer, I believe it's in the Grand Canyon.

No it didn't

[arodland]

It did 4 months worth of computation in 4 months. If it had been 420 years worth of computation it would have taken 420 years. It's like infomercials that say "and you get all this, a $899 value, for $30!" Obviously it's not "a $899 value" or you would be selling it for that instead of $30. Perhaps, though, they mean that they did 420 processor-years of work over the course of 4 months (meaning that they would have had an average of 1260 cores doing something useful at any time).

Re:No it didn't

[Raxxon]

Assuming your math is accurate (and I'm too tired to look honestly) why were 5k systems used? Were the remaining 3740 used for control/coordination? If so that seems a little... sloppy in my mind. Or were these linked via a SETI-like configuration where nodes were coming on-/going off-line "at random"?

Re:No it didn't

[arodland]

Your guess is as good as mine. My math is good as far as I can tell. It might have just been one of those things where you can only parallelize a problem so far, so nodes spent more of their time waiting for required results than doing anything. Or it could have been, as you said, an unreliable environment where the computers weren't dedicated. Or the numbers could be entirely off. I'm not horribly worried about finding out the specifics either :)

Re:No it didn't

[Firethorn]

Maybe it wasn't 1260 core-years of the average client, but the best computer they could have otherwise been able to afford. Toss in double or triple redundency for security and accuracy* and there you go.

*because SETI at home discovered some asses hacked the clients to artificially raise their score.

Yeah....so did they find the cure ?

[Anonymous Coward]

or just 420 years worth of junk data ?

In Soviet Matrix, grids run on YOU

[iamacat]

I imagined a beowulf cluster of those, nekked and petrified. Then I got ashamed of myself for rehashing the old meme and dumped hot grits in my pants. As I was convulsing on the ground, there was only one thought left in my mind:

"Does it run Linux?"

Re:In Soviet Matrix, grids run on YOU

[Fred_A]

And how long does it take to run an infinite loop ?

look at the name....

[ganjadude]

sorry... nothing to contribute today but my name {thats what alcohol does... if i was (just) stoned, i would have a few pages to contribute}....damn alcohol....

Re:Grid computing vs distributed computing project

[Anonymous Coward]

Grid computing is ill-defined, but it is about distributed processing, as is BOINC. BOINC (which now powers SETI@home) is a potential component or subset of what is now considered to be Grid. Some similar systems preexisted the current work on Grid, e.g. Condor, but then the Grid concept was first referenced at the end of the 1960s. Grid now adds concepts such as services (again not a new idea), and also workflows (again not new) and also work on data distribution.

The work that was done under WISDOM was unlike SETI@home in that it was distributing work to clusters (e.g. GridPP machines) rather than individual machines using gLite from EGEE, with local job managers then taking the work to the individual machines. SETI@home uses BOINC as the end-to-end work distribution system. Reading between the lines the Storage Request Broker (SRB) was probably used to control data access.

420 years of data in for months

[__aahlyu4518]

So actually it is just 4 months of data with the new standard they set.

SETI@home

[Kained]

This may be a bit obvious to all you /.rs ... but what the hell...

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

Re:SETI@home

[edschurr]

I always thought SETI@home was kind of silly. If I'm going to donate CPU time, do I really want to look for ET gazallions of light-years away, or do I want to cure cancer?

moNd down

[Anonymous Coward]

*BSD is dead. reaper Nor do tyhe

A question: Did it work?

[Catharsis]

If the headline were "NEW MALARIA DRUGS FOUND WITH AID OF GRID COMPUTING" I would be much more impressed.

It's all well and good to tie a big grid to a problem, but if you don't ask the right questions, you won't get useful answers.

Are there any significant grid computing success stories?

-pvh

Your hard drive yes, Wikipedia no.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Your work computer can be managed by the company you work at; they can even revoke root if they're concerned about security. There are actually a few existing distributed filesystems for Linux, though most of them suck, and the few I've seen with the potential not to suck either cost money or are a long way from being stable on Linux. Haven't seen ANY of these on Windows.

Someone mentioned backup, which isn't a big deal. Ever heard of RAID? Yeah, it could be something like that.

Although if it's a desktop PC, the 40 gigs probably isn't worth the power required to keep your computer on, and they're probably better with insanely aggressive local stores to speed up disk access. But again, these kind of suck for Linux.

The closest thing to a solid, clean design that I can find for Linux network filesystems is NFS, and that doesn't have any of the features we're talking about -- not without combining it with one of these other kludges...

two big problems that need a grid

[master_p]

Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?

I can think of two:

this

...and this.

The female psyche

[MICHICAUST]

Which is, according to all evidence and experience, a most... intriguing problem to a male consciousness. Now that there is the technology available, we should _FINALLY_ take advantage of it and find out about the secret inner workings of this giant enigma! Go grid computing! - Michael

Volunterism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I volunteer my time and money to subsidize some company when they will make millions(billions) of dollars a year?

  Do you volunteer for google? Microsoft? or Target for 4 month without pay?

  My tax payers money already go to NIH which subsidizes all the drug development research in the world. What do I get out of it? 40 dollars per tablet medicine?

  Fuck this. They want my work, they will pay me. They want 5000 computers, I will set up the servers, they will pay my workers and my company money. End of the story. This is no fucking communism where all the workers work for peanuts and scum bags daughters fucking fly on super sonic jets from moscow to paris so she can fucking buy perfume.

  Fuck this project, fuck it with a blunt spoon.

IA and speed

[briancnorton]

It's called information assurance. There are reasons that a Netapp/EMC array costs $25,000 per terabyte when a 1TB maxtor usb drive costs less than $1000. The first is that it is made to tolerate faults and be redundant. Sure you could do this in an enterprise, but then you end up with massive duplication to get around people turning off their computers, a massively expensive and complex distribution and tracking system, and higher failure and lower performance of desktop drives that are now running your webserver and processing an access DB for the local user. The second is speed. Data IO has always been my limiting factor. Working with any kind of media, large databases, etc, speed is king. Not only are desktop drives single channel and slower (RPMs), but they are now seperated over a network that may already be flooded. Information assurance isn't cheap, but it's worth it.

HHG

[PrimordialSoup]

Kinda like the what the mice were doing, before earth was destroyed by the vogons...

Re:Wow, 25% scalability! Amazing!

[Anonymous Coward]

"In this case, they ran 5,000 computers over 4 months. Assuming a single task is solvable in under 4 months by a single system, they should have had no difficult task division problems to solve, absolutely minimal synchronization issues and next to no lag issues to address. In short, even a pretty inefficient programmer should be able to approach 1:1 scalability in that easy of a scenario."

Here you are confusing CPU time with wall clock time. The task may have taken 4 months of wall clock time, but what proportion of those machines' time was running the WISDOM tasks? Given that the UK machines were from the GridPP project I would guess that the machines were only running the jobs part of the time, and in fact the article notes that this was the case. So the scalability issue (or this part of it) is a red herring as what the analysis actually showed was that using CPU resources that would otherwise have gone unused led to the job being run in 4 months (granted the electricity cost is not zero, though). Actually given how heavily loaded many clusters are in the UK I am surprised it didn't take longer than 4 months (as that implies only 75% cluster load from other jobs, whereas 90% is often more typical).

hrm

[Danzigism]

the question is, were they 5,000 GRID computers?? like these? heheh

Re:Wow, 25% scalability! Amazing!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, no - you are talking about 4 months when using CPU resources not otherwise being used by other things on clusters with another primary purpose. What you are complaining about is like admonishing someone who says they spent 72 hours building a model kit for not having started it on Monday and finished the the last moment of Wednesday.

420

[Anonymous Coward]

420 years huh.... niiiiiiiice

Finding water on Mars

[onouno]

Mars global orbiter has sent back high resolution pictures of the surface that would take scientists a few years to scan to find definitive signs of water on Mars. This would be a perfect candidate for such a system.

simpily amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

no one's ever done anything like this before.

this really is news!

DDT

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Malaria would be a forgotten disease if the ecopagans hadn't outlawed DDT.

Tens of millions of human beings [typically brown & black, and suffering in the most politically correct of third world cesspools] die every year because of our arrogant and narcissistic obsession with this pagan religion.

Re:DDT

[gordgekko]

Well said. If it were millions of cute white babies dying every year, they'd be selling DDT in grocery stores. What's that? They're just black babies? Carry on!

Fallacy of the One Biggest Problem

[p3d0]

There have been lots of responses already, but I would like to add another...

There seems to be a widespread fallacy that all human resources should be applied to the One Biggest Problem facing humanity at any given moment. Overlooking for a moment the obvious problems inherent in trying to choose the One Biggest Problem, and assuming we could actually rank all human problems in a well-defined order, there are still two huge problems with this approach:

1. Diminishing returns. Putting twice as many people on a problem doesn't solve it twice as quickly. The extra people could well be more productive working on a separate problem. This is the well-known fallacy of the Mythical Man-Month.

2. Misplaced priorities. The majority of people in the world do not have cancer. If all the resources of humanity were spent on cancer, where would that leave the rest of us that don't have cancer? "Sorry, we've stopped making antibiotics, insulin, toothpaste, books, and clothing so we can focus on fighting cancer."

In addition, there's an implicit assumption in the parent poster's position that the researchers who are looking for a cure for malaria have been wasting their time. I'd like to ask, what has *he* been doing during this time? I hope he has been looking for a cancer cure, or else he's nothing but a hypocrite.

but of course, malaria was nearly wiped out...

[wmeyer]

It's worth mentioning that malaria was nearly wiped out by the simple and inexpensive use of DDT before Rachel Carson and her sympathizers managed to get the stuff banned. And 35 years later, pretty much all her arguments have been shown to have been fabricated. But hey, only 30 million+ died as a result.

It's nice to know that grid computing can be used to evaluate the potential of all those compounds, of course, as there are certainly applications for that. But the context of the current test is one that we should be ashamed is necessary.

Re:but of course, malaria was nearly wiped out...

[Ambitwistor]

Ah, the old "well-meaning but naive environmentalists make stupid decisions" meme.

The ban on DDT in the U.S. did not result in 30 million deaths from malaria. There is no international ban on DDT: it is still used in developing countries to combat malaria, and it can only be used up to a point before the mosquitoes start developing immunity to it. (In fact, it is even used in the U.S. occasionally for disease control as a residential insecticide; it is only banned as a general-use agricultural pesticide.)

Re:but of course, malaria was nearly wiped out...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is so US-centric, isn't it.

I lived more than 20 years in Sudan, Africa. And I got my fair share of malaria, which is as common a disease in that country as flu is here (UK). And you guess what, DDT is not banned there. I even remember sometimes the whole city is swept in it. Still, it is not as effective against mosquitoes as it used to be, and the germ develop resistance against normal medicines. So I find your reasoning very simplistic.

The only headline I really want to see...

[Spittoon]

...is "Grid computing finds cure for malaria."

I could look through the threads of my bedroom rug for 420 years and not find the cure either.

Eyes on the prize, people.

The numbers are on the low side

[rfc1394]

Let's consider these numbers. It is 420 years of data for one machine, spread out over a number of machines.

• Spread out over five machines, that's 84 years.
• Spread out over ten machines, that's 42 years.
• Spread out over 50 machines, that's 8.4 years (100 months, or 8 years, and just under five months).
• Spread out over 500 machines, that's 0.84 years (306 days, or about ten months.).
• Spread out over 5000 machines, that's 31 days or about one month.

Since the work took 4 months, it implies that each machine was used for about 25% of capacity. Now, the big point would be that they got the work done for free other than overhead costs (creating the grid software and networking, etc.). Which ain't bad.

A Question!

[sciop101]

Can Entropy be reversed?

How about global warming

[Mathness]

Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?

How about "Global warming: Are humans affecting the enviroment on Earth"?

I don't think 5k computers can solve it, better increase the numbers tenfold or more. ;p

Re:How about global warming

[Lucas.Langa]

Solving this problem using computers would surely skew the results, now wouldn't it?

Re:How about global warming

[Mathness]

That was the point of the joke.

Weather computer has a dual meaning. :p

Re:How about global warming

[Lucas.Langa]

Yeah.. we pesky non-native speakers always bump into things like that. I guess the distance between "I understand what you're saying" and "I understand what you mean" is longer than it seems.

Brute-forcinig crypto...

[NerveGas]

      With a botnet of a few hundred thousand machines, brute-forcing the crypto application of your choice would immediately come to mind. Whether that would be one of the better uses of the botnet is questionable, but hey, if you have something that's really important to you to try to crack...

steve

World Community Grid

[geopsychic]

Another grid computing project is the World Community Grid. Members have contributed over 75,000 CPU years to several projects. See the http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/.

The last time I checked there were over 260,000 members. Over 100,000 have joined a team. There is a slashdotusers team (one of the larger teams) as well as the one I am in UserFriendly.Org.

Why Yes, I Have One

[LifesABeach]

"...Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?..."

One of today's greatest problems facing all humanity is Gravity. Use the Grid to solve Anti-Gravity.

Re:Grid computing vs distributed computing project

[Duncan3]

Nope, FOlding@home and the article are talking about he same thing.

We do over 420 years of compute time ever day tho :)

They will need to be very lucky

[JB]

This sort of stuff is part of my job. Full disclosure: I am a molecular modeler at a large pharmaceutical company. People always want this method to work, and it seldom does. Why? The models are too primitive, automated data analysis will miss true hits, signal to noise ratio is very high. First of all, what they are looking for is properly termed a hit, not a drug. The odds of a drug (i.e. the final chemical entity that gets FDA approval) coming out of this type of screen is beyond astronomic.

Secondly you need to understand what they're actually doing. They have a rigid model of a receptor/enzyme/protein that is relevant to malaria. Then they dock what's called a library of compounds into that receptor and compute a score based on various interactions and/or properties. Almost surely explicit solvent is not taken into account, amongs a host of other simplifications. Probably then they will have to use some kind of cut off. What will that be? Well it depends on the actual number of compounds they can test in a real assay. If it was this easy, don't you think there'd be way more drugs out there, and development wouldn't cost millions of dollars? Trust me, I see these kinds of kooky proposals all the time, and while I wish them the best, I don't hold out too much hope.

An experiment I've done myself: compare the results of an experimental high throughput screen on 1.5M compounds against a virtual screen (very much analogous to what was run here). Result: 1% overlap of the top 20% of compounds from either screen. Shouldn't the model be able to reproduce reality better?

This kind of method can work in limited cases and with much smaller numbers of compounds. Brute force rarely does.

other 'big picture' problems out there?

[bryan1945]

Brain: "Pinky, tonight we will take over the world!"

That sounds like a good one!

420 years of computing

[Anonymous Coward]

420 years of computing.. hmm I wonder where they pulled that number from....
What drugs did they say they where "researching?"

Break DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

That much computing power could drastically cut the amount of time needed to brute force private keys, so why not leverage it to break the DRM keys used to encrypt the new music/videos/etc?

The Common Cold, HIV, Global Warming, Cancer, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Grid computing, or other technologies which provide for synergies, may help cure maladies such as the common cold, HIV, global warming,
cancer, etc. Why not? Better hurry, as bush will be bombing Tehran by the end of April....

Re:Grid computing vs distributed computing project

[Crazy Gilmore]

I stand behind my assertion that the project described in the article about "420 years of computing" is not running on the same kind of system that folding at home is running on. The two wikipedia links are fairly clear and the system described in the original article is not the same as that used by folding at home. Gil

Great Global Grid

[DrRotwang]

There's been a lot of talk that the "WWW" may become the "GGG", the Great Global Grid, and I think it might actually happen. The network will absorb not just the information, but the computing power too...