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."
A New Buzz-phrase is Borne Unto the World (Score:5, Informative)
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: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: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.