Towards a World Wide Grid? 105
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."
huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:huh? (Score:2, Funny)
I'm not sure how you failed to understand the summary. It was fully buzzword-compliant.
Re:huh? (Score:1, Informative)
A website I've worked on, http://www.gridipedia.eu/ , might help with some of the buzzwords. It even has the (terribly titled) GridDic http://www.gridipedia.eu/grid-computing-glossary.html - a glossary of Grid terms.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)
I only got as far as:
That was enough for me
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Just for the record, he did go on to say "In recent months, the concept of 'cloud computing' was all the buzz. " .
And he'd know, because 99% of buzzbombing is done by him.
Re:huh? (Score:3, Funny)
A world wide grid makes me think about that old science fiction story where the grid finally is connected and the first question someone asks is:
"Is there a God"
And gets the answer:
"Now there is"
(Reservations for the accuracy in my quotes)
Not that it's likely right now. But if there is a world-wide grid then there is in theory an awful lot of computing power available. It's interesting to see what can be done with such a solution.
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Surveillance gvmt's wet dream?
Re:huh? (Score:2)
That's me - seeing the dark lining in cloud computing
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Re:huh? (Score:1)
Re:huh? (Score:0, Offtopic)
Re:huh? (Score:0, Offtopic)
Re:huh? (Score:2)
I prefer to FEEDBEEF
httg:/wwg.foldingathome.org ? (Score:2)
A threat to America (Score:3, Funny)
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.
A New Buzz-phrase is Borne Unto the World (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A New Buzz-phrase is Borne Unto the World (Score:2, Funny)
This random troll/advertisment brought to you by the Dangerologists [slashdot.org] makers of Lemonandkarl.com [slashdot.org]
Re:A New Buzz-phrase is Borne Unto the World (Score:1)
Since it seems pretty clear the whole point of TFA was to draw attention to this project, kind of like free advertising I figure I'll just jump on the bandwagon.
Isn't everything on here free advertising? I get to see a lot of advertising without having to pay for it :)
Re:A New Buzz-phrase is Borne Unto the World (Score:1)
Now if only there was some way to force people to visit our brilliance [lemonandkarl.com], maybe I should talk to Microsoft, or various ISP's...they seem to know how to force interaction with public consent
-Rob
Re:A New Buzz-phrase is Borne Unto the World (Score:1)
Free advertising away!
This random troll/advertisment brought to you by the Dangerologists [dangerologists.com] makers of Lemonandkarl.com [lemonandkarl.com]
Re:A New Buzz-phrase is Borne Unto the World (Score:2)
Re:A New Buzz-phrase is Borne Unto the World (Score:1)
You call THAT a buzzword?!? (Score:2)
"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...
Re:You call THAT a buzzword?!? (Score:1)
Better than "World Wide Tubes".
Re:You call THAT a buzzword?!? (Score:1)
Am I the only one who imagined a very, very large pair of nicely-shaped tubes covering the Earth?
Re:You call THAT a buzzword?!? (Score:2)
"Am I the only one who imagined a very, very large pair of nicely-shaped tubes covering the Earth?"
Sounds hot. Pic or stfu.
You call THAT a overdose?!? (Score:2)
Ah, what Viagra can't do?
Re:You call THAT a buzzword?!? (Score:2)
Re:You call THAT a buzzword?!? (Score:1)
I propose Skynet....
Re:You call THAT a buzzword?!? (Score:0)
If you really want to tempt faith:
- Skynet
- Colossus
- Guardian
Re:You call THAT a buzzword?!? (Score:0)
Tempt fate. You tempt fate to hit you with something bad by doing something risky.
English motherfucker, do you speak it?!
Re:You call THAT a buzzword?!? (Score:0)
Ah, sorry, you've worked out with no information that he's an 'English motherfucker' and you're asking if he speaks Italian ?
You call THAT a proper noun?!? (Score:2)
""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"?
Re:You call THAT a proper noun?!? (Score:1)
in a name (Score:2)
howabout "Matrix" ? 8)
At least Matrix would capture headlines... (Score:1)
"Compuserve's WOW! network features the WORLD WIDE GRID!"
Soooo 90's.
"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:1)
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:2)
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:2)
"but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order ... what HAVE the Romans ever done for US?"
With all due respect, either help get us off the grid or stop bitching about it.
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:2)
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:3, Informative)
>>and the fact that the effort described in TFA was funded by the EU doesn't make me feel any better about it.
This is hardly new stuff. The term Grid was coined in... hang on, lemme check my Grid textbook from 1999, it's holding up my Linux monitor... well, hmm, it doesn't say when it was coined, but I found a reference from at least 1997. In any event, instrumentation of Grids has been one of the four major areas in the field for a long time. When I was at the San Diego Supercomputer Center as a grad student (specializing in HPC), I knew various people working on it, including some of my lab mates.
While this piece of software in the TFA looks vaguely interesting, I don't think it looks particularly revolutionary at all.
I think what's throwing off most people here on Slashdot is the term World Wide Grid, which is exactly the same thing as The Grid, as The Grid has always been an (amorphous) hetereogenous worldwide cluster running via various software layers. I guess if you've never looked at Grid Computing before (as apparently Ronald Picquepalle hasn't), the concept is kind of neat, but this package is pretty non-revolutionary. Just a GUI for resource discovery packages.
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:2)
Were you a grid grad? And were you happy?
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:2)
>>Were you a grid grad? And were you happy?
Heh, I was a HPC grad student, but I worked in Fran Berman's lab for a while, which revolved around Grid computing. A great group of people to hang out with. She's head of the supercomputer center now, I think. It's an interesting field, but not exactly my cup of tea.
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:2)
I am not a cloud expert, but:
Anything with "grid" in it makes me think "designed by committee" and "sucks"...
I am a cloud expert, and I tend to agree with you.
Sam
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:2)
> I am a cloud expert
Do you specialize in cumulus?
sorry...
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:2)
"The Grid" is to be used to analyze data from the LHC. Or in other words, you have some of the brightest scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists in the world involved with this project with high stakes in it. To say you don't trust it because it was funded by the EU is a bit like saying you don't trust NASA to write code for a robot because it was funded by the white house.
Re:"Grid" = "design by committee"? (Score:1)
I suppose I'm just jealous that their pet project got EU funding and mine didn't :-)
(Incidentally, I'm in a club with the president of the Open Grid Forum, and every so often I kid him about the state of grid software. I'm also the kind of guy who likes cars with no power anything, programming in C, and vi. I am *such* a luddite. Hence my preference for simple systems like Hadoop.)
Obligatory Terminator Reference.... (Score:1)
Re:Obligatory Terminator Reference.... (Score:0)
Nah.... People might get hurt when it becomes selfaware...
Re:Obligatory Terminator Reference.... (Score:0)
It is already too late, it is self-aware, most just don't realize it yet...
Am I the only one ... (Score:2)
... 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.
Re:Am I the only one ... (Score:2)
We really could use a world wide grid, one that uses HVDC to connect suppliers of electric power to the users across large distances. This would make intermittent power sources such as wind much more useful.
Trying to use this term for a network is just plain annoying.
Total lack of understanding... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Total lack of understanding... (Score:4, Funny)
Total lack of understanding indeed.
It's almost as if there are applications outside the domain that you describe, for which this would be useful. And as if this is not being aimed at consumers at all.
Tsk tsk.
Re:Total lack of understanding... (Score:0)
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.
Yep. 640k is enough for everyone.
Re:Total lack of understanding... (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but it seems to me that this could be useful for any job that can be broken into smaller parts. Maybe a task would create so many parts that a single computer would take years to complete them all. That's where I see grid computing making sense. It's like all the systems in the world are a single processor and each individual system is a separate core capable of running a thread.
Re:Total lack of understanding... (Score:0)
It could work if we had physical computer grids instead of the current star-topology networks. If I could offload some work to an idle machine that is just some ms away, without having to configure anything. Yes, decentral computing is less effective than big blob datacenters, but so many computers are running idle anyway because hibernation doesn't work well enough or people are just too lazy to shut them down.
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.
That will never happen. I don't know if that law has a name, but the overhead of apps increases at least as quickly as computing power. I would even say that in user experience, computers are getting slower.
Interplanetary cluster? (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
(Man, isn't everyone tired of that joke by now? Oh, you are? Sorry.)
Re:Interplanetary cluster? (Score:2)
Yes, Toe. Good call.
Anyone for a grendel cluster of imaginary, EU-sponsored grids?
I'm not a visionary in this space, by any means, but it seems that "cloud," "grid," and the like are being bantered around willy-nilly, like some sort of scientific Web 3.0 mantra that will propagate and solve all the problems that the physicists and mathematicians are encountering getting computer time.
Now, that's not as cynical as it sounds. We've heard this stuff from a lot of very "credible" sources in the past, and even seen some very viable solutions to this, in many number-crunching areas.
I've yet to see, however, any viable option proposed by a concrete, wide-spread and (forgive me) organized body that really convinced me that something like this is on the horizon. SETI was dis-organized. The genome project was dis-organized. Is this any different?
Unfortunately, I think so. By putting a "cloud" or "grid" under a bubble of government organization, somehow this seems to correlate to an impetus to regionalize the benefits into a small area, and really not let it benefit from a wider frame of resources. Obvious? Probably. Why let those snippets of information out into the public?
Well, because that's where the computing power is. My question is: when are the powers that be going to understand that there are more flops out in the meatworld than they have at their fingertips, and make use of them? If these questions, problems and potential solutions are important, then all of the resources should be utilized. Encryption? Maybe. Compartmentalization? Perhaps. But there's got to be a better answer than these proposed government botnets that seek to harness something that is already willing to be granted.
Man, all of that really sounds paranoid, doesn't it? :-)
Oh, and I really like the idea of Grendel clusters!
Re:Interplanetary cluster? (Score:1)
Re:Interplanetary cluster? (Score:2)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
Meh. You put beowulf clusters inside grids, but you don't build beowulfs out of grids because the latency will totally slay you.
World Wide Grid (Score:5, Funny)
Re:World Wide Grid (Score:0)
Ouch.
Re:World Wide Grid (Score:2)
Only if it has "Beta" written in the corner, and a gradient fill somewhere.
Re:World Wide Grid (Score:2)
You're still thinking in Web 2.0 terms.
Web 3.0 will not need those things, it's going to be Pony Powered [djangopony.com]!
Re:World Wide Grid (Score:0)
It was said first on /.
Re:World Wide Grid (Score:0)
Nope, this is Cloud Computing 0.9.31 rc03
Re:World Wide Grid (Score:1)
WTF, just WTF? (Score:1, Offtopic)
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?
Buzzword Bingo (Score:2)
After reading that article, I just totally filled up my Buzzword Bingo [wikipedia.org] card.
Thanks, Roland!
Group suckers EU out of money with buzzwords (Score:2)
Re:Group suckers EU out of money with buzzwords (Score:2)
A target waiting to be sued (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Re:A target waiting to be sued (Score:1)
Re:A target waiting to be sued (Score:1)
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?
Not long: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/prism/technology.shtml [bbc.co.uk]
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).
Quite the opposite: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/latest-stable/security/key/#security-key-mutualauthentication [globus.org]
Oh oh..... (Score:1)
Imagine the amount of SPAM this will pump out after it gets hit with a worm....
Built on top of the Internet (Score:0)
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.
A grid on top of a web? (Score:2)
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.
Do we really need this? (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:2)
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?
the grid is dead; long live the cloud? (Score:1)
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.
Talk to the experts in Grid. McColo (Score:2)
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.
So all that buzzwordiness boils down to... (Score:2)
Screenshots [geclipse.org]
As one of their two demos [geclipse.org], 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 [amazonwebservices.com] or using Amazon's own ElasticFox [sourceforge.net].
Re:So all that buzzwordiness boils down to... (Score:2)
As an experienced (scientific) participant in a great deal of EU projects I can assure you that this project is dead on arrival.
The EU commision has embarked on a path of extensive central planning and increased bureaucratic and political control of the projects that it funds. The reason is simple. Research is not the primary reason for funding research projects in the EU. In combination with a strong level of support for state subsidies to industry and general socialist practices this leads to a predictable outcome:
Projects fail miserably or need further life support from EU to stay alive.
Centralised Firewall of Doom (Score:0)
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.
Leverage (Score:0)
Perhaps this could be leveraged to run Crysis at high.
Douglas Adams was right. (Score:2)
The Earth is becoming one giant computer.
Re:Douglas Adams was right. (Score:1)
Think about it.
Re:Douglas Adams was right. (Score:2)
The Earth was designed to calculate the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything by following the evolution of life upon it; this is merely the final phase.
Re:Douglas Adams was right. (Score:1)
Re:Douglas Adams was right. (Score:2)
Not necessarily all of them, but it's certainly possible that some of them were.
Comment removed (Score:2)
Buzzword Bingo (Score:2)
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
Crypto and neutrality (Score:1)
That being said, how will the computational traffic be managed? Will there be a "grid neutrality" debate in the near future?
Reliable community? (Score:0)
"the reliable eco-system of the Eclipse community"... The community may be reliable, but the program itself is buggy as hell.
Software assurance, anyone? Bueller? Bueller? (Score:1)
the rise of the machines (Score:0)
SKynet is that you?
Sure it's all fun and games until the grid thinks humans are a threat and eliminates them.
Not really a "grid" as such (Score:0)
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.