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."

Comments

A New Buzz-phrase is Borne Unto the World

[14erCleaner]

If you google "integrated workbench framework" (in quotes), all of the 250-something results seem to refer to this project.

"Grid" = "design by committee"?

[dkegel]

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.)

Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"?

[scheme]

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.

Hadoop doesn't work well for quite a few workloads like those handled by seti@home or boinc. Grids like TeraGrid, OSG, and EGEE are certainly working right now and doing real significant amounts of real work.

Yes, quite a bit of these grids are designed by committee but it's something that needs to be done in order to let people drop jobs onto a random cluster and expect it to work.

E.g. suppose you send a job to a cluster, how do you where your data and program will be, what sort of execution limits are there (can your job run for 4 hours,10 hours, 24, more?), which directories are locally mounted and available for holding temporary data, where and how do you transfer your 80GB of data, etc. All of these info needs to be advertised in a easily parsed format otherwise the grid becomes useless.

Interplanetary cluster?

[Toe, The]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.

(Man, isn't everyone tired of that joke by now? Oh, you are? Sorry.)

World Wide Grid

[actionbastard]

Could this be Web 3.0?

Re:huh?

[smallfries]

I only got as far as:

Roland Piquepaille writes:

That was enough for me