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Towards a World Wide Grid?
Roland Piquepaille writes "In recent months, the concept of 'cloud computing' was all the buzz. European researchers think about another name, the World Wide Grid, which could run on top of the Internet. In an article to appear soon, ICT Results will report about the g-Eclipse project. As the scientists said, 'the g-Eclipse project aims to build an integrated workbench framework to access the power of existing Grid infrastructures. The framework will be built on top of the reliable eco-system of the Eclipse community to enable a sustainable development.' The project started in July 2006 and was successfully completed in June 2008 for a total cost of €2.5 million, including a EU contribution of €1.96 million."
I'm a comp sci nerd, but I didn't get anything from the summary. I'm definately not going to read the article.
Will this eventually be a browser style UNC activation or will we all move more to a google-sidebar sort of 'fing?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
These Italian schemes are a threat to America and everything Americans hold dear: our children, our base-ball parks, and our Hot Dogs. I say that these "nets" should be banned from the American intern net for security and moral purposes.
If you google "integrated workbench framework" (in quotes), all of the 250-something results seem to refer to this project.
Have you read my blog lately?
"World Wide Grid"? C'mon, we can do better than that. Cripes even GTE even managed to put some pizzaz with "Verizon".
Hell, the damn Metasploit group should have patented the concept of "framework" so somebody could join my lawsuit over this blatant disregard for my patent on buzzwords(TM)...
Ah, screw it, this will likely get bought by Google anyway...
howabout "Matrix" ? 8)
I am not a cloud expert, but: Anything with "grid" in it makes me think "designed by committee" and "sucks"... and the fact that the effort described in TFA was funded by the EU doesn't make me feel any better about it. Maybe it would make more sense to wait until something like Hadoop takes over the world, then just standardize existing practice. (Apologies to my friends in the grid world.)
SkyNet anyone?
Impetuous! Homeric!
... to find it ironic that the will be a world wide "cloud" grid. And yet the thing that gave it the name i.e. the power grid is anything but world wide - barely continent wide with infrastructure taxed to the breaking point.
This will not work for most consumer applications. You want to play a video game -- you can't 'outsource' that processing to a grid because of latency -- in the time it takes to submit the raw data and get a result back, your system could have done it locally. It might work for complex photoshop filtering where the user might have to wait a few seconds to a minute. It would certainly be nice for transcoding video. In short, "grid" computing is good for non-interactive (batch) tasks. Most consumers have little need of this. It's far more useful for commercial enterprise.
Not only is there a latency issue, but there's a bandwidth issue -- a really big one. Very few people have a fiber link to the internet and unlimited bandwidth. And there's a lot of businesses out there that want to have it stay that way. Comcast comes to mind as internet equivalent of OPEC -- except instead of barrels we've got gigabytes. It's an artificial market, but until the infrastructure is radically modified, grid computing is only going to be happening between large data centers made for and run by commercial business. And by the time the bandwidth issue is "solved", grid computing might be meaningless because the hardware will be so much faster and storage space so much more plentiful that there's little justification for Joe Average.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
(Man, isn't everyone tired of that joke by now? Oh, you are? Sorry.)
""World Wide Grid"? C'mon, we can do better than that. Cripes even GTE even managed to put some pizzaz with "Verizon"."
How about "WAYNE"?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Could this be Web 3.0?
Sig this!
Ah, what Viagra can't do?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
This week the RIAA decided to sue Sourceforge. How is a world wide grid going to help anyone? Who is going to stand up and tell the **AA to fuckoffanddie. While this sounds like a good idea, there are many legal problems to work out as the RIAA have demonstrated this week.
Even if they find a way to make grid computing attractive for many applications, who has responsibility? There are economics to think of etc. If money was no object, we could all travel to work in a limo. If traffic was no problem, we could all leave home within minutes of having to be at work. If security was no problem we would not need locks on our doors.
I'm not saying that grid computing has no place, but it does not seem feasible in the near term for most people/entities due to one or more of the many concerns. Does anyone know of a link or many links that show why this should not be a concern?
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After reading that article, I just totally filled up my Buzzword Bingo card.
Thanks, Roland!
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
How will grid computing be viable without depending on altruistic sharing of resources? Will the costs and benefits of grid computing outweigh the investment, coordination, and technical challenges? Don't worry about all of that... cloud, grid, framework, graphical interface, Eclipse. Oooooh, that sounds technical, here's your money.
From the article:
Where the internet is a communications channel between computers, the grid goes beyond this by not just using the internet for communications but also as a means of sharing computing resources. Every computer and user can access and make use of the combined resources of the grid.
And just how long will it be before someone decides to create a WWG application that uses it as one vast storage pool of copyrighted material with distributed indexing of the contents and the RIAA, MPAA, ... of the world sue the whole thing into non-existance or buy laws to make it a criminal offence to run it?
Structured correctly you wouldn't know who was adding to it or downloading data from it. After all a download would be just be a request to replicate a bit more data making a vastly distributed virtual filesystem a bit more redundant. You may not even be able to tell if it was someone making a request to make a local copy or the software automatically increasing storage redundancy of static data (assuming that there's no logging).
Imagine the amount of SPAM this will pump out after it gets hit with a worm....
They've got hopes. Another comment mentioned anything with the word "Grid" makes them think of "design by committee" and "sucks". Too true.
What I'm surprised is that someone wants to build something on top of the totally unreliable Internet. I mean, let's get VoIP working reliably - as in 99.95% uptime for a whole year + QoS.
Not enough buzzwords. We need to lay a mesh on top of that and then a fabric, then a matrix and so on and so forth. Collectively they'll be referred to as the WWM or World Wide Mess. You heard it here first.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Now granted its a really cool idea and its even quite handy for organizations who need more power. There have been times when I'm sitting at work running an FPGA simulation and I click the go button and go for a walk.
At home reading some news doing some simple development and hell even compiling a new kernel here and there I'm generally happy with the speed of my laptop. Hell I'm even contemplating giving up some speed in exchange for portability so long as I don't have to skimp on resolution.
Much of the world is already in a power crunch. Not only a power crunch but a fuel crunch in general. So when we decide that gas is too expensive and we all start plugging our cars into the grid the problem gets even worse. Can you imagine if ALL of the world's computers hit 100% usage all the time so they could constantly be servicing who ever needed resources at the moment?
Laptop's probably wouldn't want to opt into this network for the huge hit they'd take in battery life. Not to mention the increased bandwidth requirements needed for what most users consider background tasks.
Does this mean that Eclipse will now fail when the network is down? Or, does it mean that Eclipse will have to check in with nodes on the network before it can start properly... actually... I can kind of see the benefit in this. Bear with me for a minute here. If we can get the next rev of Eclipse to start up sooo.... slooowly... that they can't even test it before most of us retire, then we can just forget about the next rev of Eclipse. Why, if this technology is integrated into current installs via automatic updates, we can shut Eclipse down alltogether. I like it already. Where do I go to sign up?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I thought gridders finally got tired of banging their heads against the facts of latency and bandwidth. well, at least people usually talk about cloud in the same breath as SOA - that is, incredibly loosely coupled, not anything at all like clustering.
ironically, as individual computers get faster, it becomes less and less attractive to do grids, since during the 10ms it takes to talk to even a nearby city, an entry-level server could have computed over a gigaflop. eventually, it doesn't make sense to even _try_ cooperating across that kind of imbalance.
World Wide Grid sounds like something you'd see advertised as a hot new feature in a word bubble on the cardboard packaging of an old AOL or Prodigy disk.
"Compuserve's WOW! network features the WORLD WIDE GRID!"
Soooo 90's.
Didn't McColo just successfully migrated a complete world wide grid within 12hours? May be these researchers should just contract the project out to them.
Screenshots
As one of their two demos, they show how you can use the GUI to add an Amazon EC2 instance "in only five minutes" -- as opposed to typing one (1) command or using Amazon's own ElasticFox.
That's all I can see this turning into. One of the strengths of the Internet is that it's decentralized, and no particular corporation has control over large swathes of it (other than access). The conspiracy theorist in me does not want to roll over and be ass-raped by third-parties, the government following my porn habits, or any other such thing.
Perhaps this could be leveraged to run Crysis at high.
The Earth is becoming one giant computer.
a grid atop a grid?
tone it down roland, you're losing your audience.
Good people go to bed earlier.
US DoD already refers to the internet as The GIG (Global Information Grid)
I suppose it gave the defense contractors a way to differentiate their PowerPoint slides between the govvie and civvie presentations.
--MAB
So... how long will it be before someone uses the grid to distribute the computational load necessary to break some high-profile encryption?
That being said, how will the computational traffic be managed? Will there be a "grid neutrality" debate in the near future?
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"the reliable eco-system of the Eclipse community"... The community may be reliable, but the program itself is buggy as hell.
I'm interested to know how anyone is planning on making an assurance or correctness argument for anything running on an opt-in grid. We worry enough about malicious agents corrupting data on our own systems - it seems to me that international scale information warfare could have a field day with this.
SKynet is that you?
Sure it's all fun and games until the grid thinks humans are a threat and eliminates them.
So there's some amount of billions of microprocessors running around the planet in everything from iPods to cars to, I think a computerized toaster came out sometime back - "Grid," I think, is a somewhat inadequate term to describe the panoply of the various forms of the digital world.
The possibility of connecting all of this into one giant supercluster has certainly been discussed for some time, although the technicalities of such a task are rather astronomically daunting. Assuming, however, that it is possible to create some kind of hyper-adaptive OS/AI which could seamless link every computer on the planet, the question becomes what the digital experience would then be - although I don't think we're far from this reality already.
Perhaps where we should look is the possibility of hypercollaberative enterprise, across all boundaries, extending the ontology of the current medium into a supersphere of information, creativity, etc., or in short, one giant Earthbrain.