Mass Grid Computing Around the Corner? 30
zoglmannk asks: "I've become interested in grid computing. A lot has happened since the last time that I looked at it several years ago during the SETI@home heyday. Now several public supported grid applications are coming to fruit: climate modeling, cancer research, protein folding, smallpox therapies, fighting bioterrorism, mersenne prime search, evolution, SETI, and others. All of these have public interest to make a better world. Is mass adoption of public interest grid computing just around the corner? Is there really a need for a majority of those spare CPU cycles? Or is there more computing power than can reasonably be used for the types of problems that can be distributed to home and educational PCs? What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses? More education, advertisement, prizes, reimbursement?"
No spare cycles (Score:2)
The mass grid computing market just got saturated.
Cluster maybe, in a couple of years (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cluster maybe, in a couple of years (Score:1)
What is needed? (Score:1)
We need more hype [oracle.com].
An easy reward... (Score:2, Informative)
Distributed != Grid (Score:3, Informative)
Here [anl.gov] is a pdf describing what grid computing is.
Heating systems (Score:3, Funny)
Link them to a fast internet connection, pay a fraction of the heatees' power bills and you're in business for CPU intensive, network extensive grid applications.
Re:Heating systems (Score:2)
2) Stuff it with computers
3) sell your spare cpu cycels
4) use the energy extracted from to room to heat your house, thereby keeping the computerroom cool
hmmm, I forgot the ??? step. I knew something was wrong with this business model.
Distributed, Grid and how they differ (Score:5, Interesting)
Most (all?) of the cited examples are ditributed computation projects. Most have agents that call up a server and signout work to do.
The vision of grid computing is to treat computation power like electrical power. Where there is demand, the computation power "flows" and "fills" that demand.
For example, a simple example is that you have a webserver cluster, a database cluster, and a network area storage cluster, all made up of off-of-the-shelf PCs. If demand for database logic goes up and stays up, one of the computers being used for redundant storage could STOP replicating data and START being a database server. If the web requests go up, one of the database computers could stop handling database requests and start handling web requests.
Obviously, there are hard limits that must be met. We must have at least 1 web server, 1 database server, and enough storage machines to keep our data safe. We also have to detect failure or excess load and have a transition path for the generic computer to change what computational task it helps with.
Amazing stuff, and if you ponder the details of it, it is a bit of a challenge!! As another poster mentioned before, this does relate to self-healing technology and it also does relate to the distributed computing projects you mentioned in your post.
Hope this is helpful.
Re:Distributed, Grid and how they differ (Score:4, Interesting)
Most folks try to live near their jobs, or at least in the same state. If one spare cycle is the same as another spare cycle, why not have everyone in a particular geographic area work on the project whose servers are in that area? Then if a new project pops up, or if a grid computing task comes along, nearby resources could simply be reassigned.
A universal client, which would run whatever cycle-sucker was appropriate, could make this easy.
Check out OGSA (Score:4, Interesting)
Check out OGSA [globus.org] - the Open Grid Services Architecture - and learn what is and is not a Grid. This is the de facto standard for building Grids.
Even new products that are *sold* with Grid in their title aren't necessarly THE GRID though they might be A GRID.
Grid Grammar (Score:1)
The (appropriate) capitalisation of the term "GRID" in the parent is for emphasis; for those reading this and just learning about Grid Computing please note that the term "grid" is not an acronym so capialisation is inappropriate.
Similar to the distinction between "internets", "an internet", "internet technology" and "the Internet" when writing about grid computing it is appropriate to discuss "grids", "a grid" and "the Grid". With the capitalised form being used when referring a definite article such as a
semantic grid (Score:1)
exploit (Score:5, Funny)
A new microsoft exploit
Apple QMaster, XGrid (Score:2)
And then there's XGrid, designed for cooperative processing in scientific tasks. I haven't used it so I can't judge its utility.
Yep, Apple is leading the way with this sort of Grid Com
Re:Apple QMaster, XGrid (Score:2)
distributed.net ? (Score:2, Interesting)
They have been doing this for years
money (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there really a need for a majority of those spare CPU cycles? Or is there more computing power than can reasonably be used for the types of problems that can be distributed to home and educational PCs?
It doesn't take much creativity to think of ways you could use up ridiculously large amounts of cpu power. In the relatively near future, I can imagine:
- spammers paying people to compute hashcash postage
- online gamers paying for rendering of Pixar-quality animation
For the more distant future, a lot of really difficult AI problems might become more tractable if you could throw enough CPU power at them. Neurobiologists can already simulate the nervous systems of very simply organisms; maybe at some point it will become possible to simulate a human brain directly.Re:money (Score:1)
The processing potential of beyond-petascale grids is still insignificant compared to the atomic-level complexity of your own intestine. Therefore companies that can afford to pay more for resources will help to keep the cost relatively high - for example a pharmacutical company may wish to use myGrid [mygrid.org.uk] to perform some particularly extensive in-silico experiments regarding intestinal chemistry - consequently the cost of supercomputing in the future will still be beyond most people.
That's not to say the the
Spare cycles no longer exist.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If your CPU runs at 100%, you are using more power and therefore makes your electric bill increase. Therefore, when you run distributed applications, you are actually paying $$$ for what you are giving away.
In recent history, laptop CPUs have started throttling themselves and using even less power, and desktop CPUs will start doing the same before long.
Not that this has that much to do with grid computing...
Grid computings goal is usually greater utilization of your own resources...distriuted computing usually utilizes someone elses resources.
Re:Spare cycles no longer exist.... (Score:1, Insightful)
The masses. (Score:2, Insightful)
zoglmannk asked:
Grid computing is not aimed at "the masses". Most of the research [computer.org] is concentrating on building systems for solving problems which normal people have no interest in.
That's not to say that we plebs won't benefit from a "cure for X" or "lower oil prices due to better flow models within pipelines" or even "more efficient cars desgined in simulated air tunnels"; we are just very unlikel
always had this question about clusters... (Score:2)
If you build a cluster, among other things, you pay premium for:
high density server components;
major cooling and power.
Now if I use gigabit for the transport, can't I just distribute my boxes throughout the building so they can breathe easily?
Re:always had this question about clusters... (Score:1)
Or to put it another way:
Would you go to Italy for coffee when the coffee maker in your office works?
Costs beyond electricity? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Costs beyond electricity? (Score:1)