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."
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.
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: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.