Grid Computing Coming Of Age 146
ravenousbugblatter writes "The New York Times online has an article discussing grid computing and recent advances made by Dr. Ian Foster, among others. The article compares the state of grid computing over the internet to where the internet was in 1994, which was soon after the development of the software for the use of URL's, HTML, and HTTP. Predictions are made in the article that in the near future the massive power of grid computing will be available to anyone with an internet connection, not just to big companies that can afford to hire HP and Sun to run a grid project for them."
Grid2003 (Score:5, Informative)
Its the 4th one, and getting better every year.
Could the powers-that-be... (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks in advance.
Registration Free (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the registration free URL [nytimes.com]
Please use news.google.com for finding article links.
As a coder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:As a coder... (Score:3, Insightful)
If all you can do is "to see if the original cleartext is a word found in a given dictionary file" then get a life.
Wow, how revolutionary, and so suited to distributed computing (NOT).
When you have access to REAL computing power, you realise exactly what the government can do with your static keyed vpn connection and PGP (hehe) emails.
Q.
Re:As a coder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:As a coder... (Score:1)
Automated code generation? Wow...
Linked list matrix? My goodness...
"The same technique could easily be altered to sort the dictionary over multiple systems." and "Search a million word dictionary in much, much less than a second." Mmmm, you need to decide which of the previous statements is most correct - in that the time to transmit a dictionary "fragment" is either greater, smaller or the same as the time to process t
Re:As a coder... (Score:2)
"various and sundry [reference.com]" is what you meant, I think.
Re:Seti@Home (Score:1)
Q.
Re:Seti@Home (Score:4, Interesting)
Among many other things, Grid folks hope to solve problems that aren't quite so amenable to divide-and-conquer. But then they had to go base their protocols on the bloated Web services stack, implying a relatively high granularity per compute unit. So we'll see how well that works out!
My question is (Score:1)
Re:Embarassingly Parallel WAS: Seti@Home (Score:2)
1 women * 9 months = 1 baby
9 women * 9 months = 9 babies
9 women * 1 month != 1 baby
Putting 9 women on the baby-making task for 9 months is scales the baby-making operation, but since it's embarassingly parallel, it doesn't speed up any one operation (each baby still takes 9 months, but in those 9 mont
Re:Embarassingly Parallel WAS: Seti@Home (Score:1)
1 woman + 1 man * 9 months = 1 baby
1 woman + 1
etc.
Re:Embarassingly Parallel WAS: Seti@Home (Score:2)
Mmm, your example is incomplete, no ammount of woman can produce babies by themselves...
1 woman + 1 man * 9 months = 1 baby
1 woman + 1
Ah, true. You see, very few people on
Re:Embarassingly Parallel WAS: Seti@Home (Score:1)
Thus far I have quite happilly stuck it out at step 1.
Sadly it seems that's about to end. My girlfriend of two years left me this morning....
life's a bitch.
Re:Embarassingly Parallel WAS: Seti@Home (Score:2, Funny)
(1 woman + 1 man) * 9 months = 1 baby
Order of operations man! Gotta get those parenthesis right.
Re:Embarassingly Parallel WAS: Seti@Home (Score:2)
Re:Embarassingly Parallel WAS: Seti@Home (Score:2)
(1 woman + 1 man) * 9 months = 1 baby
Order of operations man! Gotta get those parenthesis right.
Not exactly, because you really only need the man for a few seconds (though I pity the guy who's that quick). So perhaps:
(1 woman + 1 man) * 30 seconds + (1 woman * 9 months) = 1 baby?
Who knew sex could be made so boring?
Re:Embarassingly Parallel WAS: Seti@Home (Score:2)
much much longer than 10 days to make a car, although
10 workers can easily make a car in 1 day, because no
one worker has the easy facility with all 10 of the distinct
production roles in producing a car. This is counter to
the argument of the skeptic of parallelism who claims that
Amdahl's law makes parallel computation inherently
inefficient, and points to what may be the single most
appealling aspect of the "Grid" paradigm for distributed
computing, to
Re:Seti@Home (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Seti@Home (Score:1)
I can't believe you're too chicken to flame without your "real" account. The fact that you can't do it with your trolling account either is just pathetic.
Grid at home as interactive graphic app (Score:2, Interesting)
I have been watching the developement of one such application: Gled [gled.org], "a hierarchic server-proxy-client-viewer model written in C++ and offering a mixture of object oriented framework and toolkit" (says the project homepage) and I can say that it looks a lot more like a Quake window to a programmable scene made of very complex object collections, running on multiple systems (and with
Re:Seti@Home (Score:2)
If you are modeling weather and divided your target regions
Does the average user care? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I guess the obvious answer is that this is Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Not News for Joe Schmoe.
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from my rather glib answer to the parent post, I should have added that for the average Joe Schmoe surfing the web, grid computing is very important for web-searches, hierarchical analysis of searches and valid links and if the spam load keeps increasing, we will have to have grids just to handle the load of email onslaught. Seriously though, all you have to do is examine any of the search engine companies. Take Google for instance. How do you think they do what they do? Grid computing is the answer.
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:2, Interesting)
Google runs a pretty big server farm yes, it's true. I'm sure grid computing helps them immensely. I guess my point was, this won't make a public impact on Joe Schmoe.
Also I was serious, how will this affect network security?
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:1)
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:2)
I uh.....guess I should have seen that one coming.
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:2, Informative)
As for security, authentication and authorization are challenging, and you may be pretty sure that Joe Schmoe will not have access to these resources.
The following article gives a nice overview :
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-55/iss-2/p42.html
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:2)
Yes and no. Consider business models. At present, there are web sites supported by corporations who wish to display advertising. What about a model in which a corporation pays for your ADSL connection, in return for n workunits/day of their distributed computing job run on your PC? More units, faster connection. Remember the average user's processor is idle most of the time, so it wou
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:2)
For this to be useful the corporation needs to be able to download and run programs at will. These programs will have to be different (for different computing needs), perhaps written by corporate customers. Needless to say, this has serious security issues; for the Joe Doe as well as the corporate customer (that wants to verify the integrity of the comput
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:5, Funny)
How else will they get the computing power to handle the AI for Clippy in the next version of windows?
"I notice you haven't done anything in a while. Would you like me to:"
-Calculate the meaning of life?
-Cure cancer?
-Run Carnivore and send the answers back to our nations great protectors?
No thanks, I'll pass.
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:1)
Re:Does the average user care? (Score:1)
You mean (Score:5, Funny)
The network really is the computer?
Where'd I put that mousepad......
"Woodstock of the grid?" Really? (Score:3, Funny)
no wonder it took so long to develop.
Ah, sweet consent... (Score:3, Funny)
Sincerely,
A dirty old mainframe
Google bigger than whole 1995 Internet . (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a question (Score:1)
From the article they seem to be basically the same thing. Or am I wrong?
Re:Just a question (Score:2)
Re:Just a question (Score:2, Insightful)
"Grid" software standard important (Score:2)
Re:"Grid" software standard important (Score:1)
Re:"Grid" software standard important (Score:2)
of the Internet in comparison to the transcendence of the
640k memory limit.
Similarly, the "Grid" is insignificant in the populatization
of distributed computing in comparison to a forthcoming
change in the mode of operation of the individual computer.
no more outdated computers (Score:1)
Read between the hype.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is great if you think it's great. Grid computing is a technology without a cause right now. It's preposterous to think that the average joe, or even the average joe company, will have any use for grid computing in the forseeable future. Most of us can't keep our load average above 0.1 (that's 10% for you Windows-users) doing anything useful as it is!
Heck, look back over the grid computing stories we've seen here on /. Whose name keeps popping up?
Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Grid computing isn't meant to be used for home users. It's meant to be used for computing tasks that would otherwise be run on super computers - Modelling molecular flow patterns and tectonic plate movements, to name but two. The implication that I read was not home users, but mobile users - Scientists and engineers who're out of the office and need an answer fast.
There are companies out there that would love to be able to run computationally intensive modelling, but can't afford the systems they need to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
Stop thinking in terms of things that you would use it for, and start thinking big but not enormous. There's plenty of stuff out there.
Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:2)
Added to that, different versions of Unix seem to have a different method for calculating load average; HP-UX in particular usually has a higher load average.
Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:2)
Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I remember hearing lots of similar sentiment about the internet in 94-95. "What email? what's that for? who needs it who will ever us that?". "Chat rooms? What a waste of time." (precursor to IM, still arguably a waste of time, but I know it saves the company I work for thousands in phone bills, and many hours in productivity). When people walk out and make claims like this, it is a big sign that what they are claiming is useless is probably the NBT
Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:2)
skin hats? Rocking chairs that operate bellows to cool the
rocker? The PUSH web? Digital cash? Grid computing?
DIVX disks? DataPlay?
Most innovation is crap. A lot of good innovation is
treated like crap.
They laughed at Einstein, yes, but they also laughed
at Bozo the Clown.
Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Grid Computing will find its reason, whether its sooner or later who knows, but dismissing it out of hand is short sighted to say the least.
Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:3, Interesting)
oh my god... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:oh my god... (Score:2)
Userful things to Google for programing (Score:2)
Rus
PS3 spreads grid to the masses (Score:3, Informative)
personally (Score:4, Informative)
Re:personally (Score:2)
Re:personally (Score:2)
Re:personally (Score:5, Informative)
Distributed computing is a collection of ideas and practices of which Grid computing is a subset. Distributed computing involves any type of computational resource sharing over a range of couplings. Grid computing, basically, is the idea of taking the solutions distributed computing has come up with so far and making implementing them over widely distributed networks in a standard framework that will make sharing easy, flexible, and powerful. At the same time, faster computers, more available storage and higher bandwidth networks are pushing the development of new distributed technologies for applications suited to a standardized, available computational grid. These applications include physics simulations, tele-immersion (sort of a networked virtual reality), climate modeling, drug discovery, etc. Yeah these are all research applications. Just like the original Internet, the research community is a natural first audience. It will be interesting to see how companies and, eventually, consumers take advantage of the Grid in the future.
Re:personally (Score:2, Informative)
It's actually one specific implementation of distributed computing, but apparently the name "Grid" caught on to the public and press, and so the term has become a general name for distributed computing projects.
At least, that's how I believe the story went...
Grid computing at VT (Score:3, Interesting)
Thus, if you like grid computing and want to do some research as a grad student or whatever, this might be the place for you.
"Grid computing" - stupid idea (Score:5, Interesting)
If you wanted to do this right now, you could cut a deal with a mid-range ISP. Buy an account on every server for use only during off-peak periods, run standard clustering software, and crunch all night. Run on a server farm with large numbers of identical machines interconnected with massive bandwidth. A true Beowulf cluster application.
Nobody does this. That's an indication there's no market for commercial "grid computing". Clusters, yes; reselling computer time, no.
Remember "push technology"? "Micropayments"? "Grid computing" will go the same way.
As for "peer to peer" systems, bear in mind that without copyright problems, music distribution would be trivial and cheap. Just put each new song out on Netnews. Netnews is far more efficient than any of the peer-to-peer systems. The music industry only generates a few tens of megabytes of new data per day, after all.
Re:"Grid computing" - stupid idea (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't believe me, check out .
Re:"Grid computing" - stupid idea (Score:1)
Re:"Grid computing" - stupid idea (Score:2)
Re:"Grid computing" - stupid idea (Score:2)
I think that like every other overhyped idea (java, WAP, P2P) this idea will find a niche and some companies will do very well with it. I know that there is a market for startup semiconductor design firms to buy time on an existing grid rather than having to purchase and manage a private grid in house that will merely turn electricity into heat 75% of the time.
I do not think that it will change the world and make great coffee.
Re:"Grid computing" - stupid idea (Score:2, Informative)
No; it's mainly universities and researchers.
If you wanted to do this right now, you could cut a deal with a mid-range ISP.
A single company may not have all the resources you need. You may wish to harness a beowulf cluster from company A, terabytes of storage from company B and use data from a telescope owned by company C.
Also demand may be transient, you might need hundreds of GFlops one minute, then nothing for hours
Re:"Grid computing" - stupid idea (Score:2, Informative)
No, you can't. Just try finding an ISP that would risk disrupting their systems to let you do that. The promise of the Grid is that it creates a standardized method of
Re:"Grid computing" - stupid idea (Score:2)
Given how hungry many mid-range ISPs are right now, you probably could, assuming you were planning to spend sizable amounts of money. (If you're not planning to spend sizable amounts of money, you don't need this technology anyway.) There are ISPs that let you run any Linux program you want, and have enough security in place to make that work. There's no reason you couldn't use their compute power right
considerations (Score:3, Informative)
All aside, it's exciting technology, not to mention that the Globus toolkit was named on the of the top 10 techs that will change the world.
For those interested in security, the Globus toolkit involves an asynchronous certificate signing method initially and then move onto a synchronous method for better performance. The Globus books and papres call this a PKI scneario. (I'm not a security guy)
Also Globus is not the only grid tech out there. Seti at home is one (and their derivatives). There are also distributed storage methods in which you can send data onto the grid and it'll be there (somewhere safely tucked away).
fun stuff!
considerations 2 (Score:2, Informative)
Premature reorts of the grid's demise... (Score:3, Insightful)
Software for URLs? (Score:3, Funny)
Ok, I think I understand this (Score:2)
as
LAN is to WAN
or am I just fooling myself?
What's all the hype about? (Score:2)
Re:What's all the hype about? (Score:1)
A Way Forward for Grid Computing (Score:5, Interesting)
Supercomputers are great, but the number of big computing problems that can handle being run on distributed groups of supercomputers is small. That's why things such as the Earth Simulator [jamstec.go.jp] and the ASCI programme [doe.gov] still exist - sometimes it's just better to build a bigger box!
Where Grid Computing might take off in the science and business mainstream is collaboration and sharing of resources. In particular, I work on producing middleware to try and share and unify data resources. In the astronomy community for instance, they have spent many years standardising the naming schemes for their databases and as a result, projects such as Skyserver [sdss.org] and SkyQuery [skyquery.net] are becoming possible. Now consider the bioinformatics field: hundreds of competing standards for naming things as simple as gene expression ids. Grid computing should provide some of the tools to make knowledge extraction from the many disparate scientific databases possible.
This has applications in business, and it's something we're already seeing in the uptake of Web Services. One recent Grid Computing initiative - Grid Services - is pushing the boundaries of Web Services, and extending them to standardise functionality such as state and lifetime management which should make them more useful for the kinds of collaborative problems which are cropping up in both business and science.
For instance: a car manufacturer has an agreement with different suppliers of airbags - obviously information exchange must take place to ensure safety of the passengers, but both the car manufacturer and airbag supplier will not necessarily want the other to be able to see all data for their parts, just use it. As suppliers change, the manufacturer must ensure that data is properly traced and expired. This is not much different from scientific collaborations, financial collaborations or even network gaming where we have a huge number of swiftly changing, transient resources.
It is these problems of dynamic collaboration and maintenance of resources that Grid Computing may eventually solve.
SWMD@Home (Score:4, Funny)
How grid computing might affect me (Score:1)
OT: Stupid T3 Distributed computing tie in (Score:1)
And then I thought, well, if Skynet is actually a distributed computing app running on computers on the internet, then, when Skynet decided to blow up all of the cities, wouldn't it also be destroying the majority of its compute nodes and thus m
Re:OT: Stupid T3 Distributed computing tie in (Score:2)
Program mobility means that Skynet wasn't
dependent on any of those specific computers,
and hence all were dispensable. It's not a hole,
it's a tunnel to your destination.
Grid Computing (Score:1)
Re:Wow! (Score:1, Funny)
Wow! Imagine your karma going down!
Distributed Google (Score:3, Informative)
Can anyone see another player apart from Microsoft having the market penetration required to make themselves the defacto distributed computing platform??
Go Google I say - let microsoft get someone else to beta test their software.
Q.
Re:Distributed Google (Score:1)
Since they are most downloaded program ever (or something) and have themselves firmly tapped into Mr Average Joe's computer I think they are in the best position.
Re:NYT site requires registration, so... (Score:1, Informative)
By STEVE LOHR
Computers do wondrous things, but computer science itself is largely a discipline of step-by-step progress as a steady stream of innovations in hardware, software and networking pile up. It is an engineering science whose frontiers are pushed ahead by people building new tools rendered in silicon and programming code rather than the breathtaking epiphanies and grand unifying theories of mathematics or physics.
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Yet computer science does have its
Re:NYT site requires reg...so let's violate DMCA! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:NYT site requires registration, so... (Score:1)
Yes and here is a Random NYTimes Reg Generator (Score:2)
I fully agree with you 100 %. And tell me about it. And what do you think of this site . Random NYTimes.com Registration Generator [majcher.com] http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
You go here and it fills the NYTimes registration page with random characters. Maybe it might come handy some day, but, oh god, you must be pretty angry about it. Yeah. And tell me about it. I agree with you fully 100%.
Re:STOP THE PRESSES!!! (Score:1)
Re:STOP THE PRESSES!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Duncan3, if you are still laughing and pointing, go stand in front of a mirror. One word for you : WRONG!
Timesharing is multiple people/jobs connecting to one mainframe or computer and "sharing" the useage of that single computer. Grid computing (aka distributed computing) is sharing one job over multiple computers. Totally differen
Re:STOP THE PRESSES!!! (Score:1)
The computing model really is the mainframe one: you submit jobs to a queue and they get run and come back to you. You don't care or know when or where th
Re:BUSH = FAGNASTY (Score:2)
That comes from the cold side of me. The half that occupies my heart says that while I agree with you that it is a tragedy, your trolling is amatuer and smallish. Reminding people of the circumstances and results of war does nothing to make anyone's grief easier and places no strain on the leaders that make such horrible decisions. Your words are better spen