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Grid Computing Coming Of Age 146

Posted by timothy from the upside-of-supersizing dept.
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."
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Grid Computing Coming Of Age More

Grid Computing Coming Of Age

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  • Grid2003 (Score:5, Informative)

    by grennis ( 344262 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @10:41PM (#6449392)
    Why settle for just reading articles when you can attend the Grid2003 [gridcomputing.org] workshop in Phoenix this November?

    Its the 4th one, and getting better every year.

  • Could the powers-that-be... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MoThugz ( 560556 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @10:42PM (#6449403) Homepage
    please consider setting up Grid Computing section! ...so that I can finally filter it!

    Thanks in advance.

  • Registration Free (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @10:45PM (#6449419)
    The article from NYTimes requires (free) registration.

    Here is the registration free URL [nytimes.com]

    Please use news.google.com for finding article links.

  • As a coder... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Valar ( 167606 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @10:45PM (#6449421)
    As a coder who works with things like md5 cracking programs (like the thingy in my sig) and various assundry other programs, I can honestly say: the crackers do NOT need any more processing power!

    • Re:As a coder... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by quinkin ( 601839 )
      If you can crack a 2k keyed encryption stream using a well regarded encryption scheme (not a simple hash like MD5), then I am impressed.

      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)

        by Valar ( 167606 )
        It's a good thing you didn't bother to actually read any farther than that. The advantage of parasite is that is uses automated code generation and a linked list matrix to make the search fast. i.e. Search a million word dictionary in much, much less than a second. And it is, very, very suited to distributed computing. The same technique could easily be altered to sort the dictionary over multiple systems (in fact, we're already testing it to do so). I've worked with VPN keys, and with WEP (yes, yes it is p
        • Well, I did actually read further than that - and to be honest it ain't impressive.

          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

    • "various assundry" indeed.

      "various and sundry [reference.com]" is what you meant, I think.

  • Does the average user care? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by chenGOD ( 670393 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @10:55PM (#6449491)
    Sure this is great if you're doing simulations or animating/rendering stuff . But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal? How will this affect network security?

    • Re:Does the average user care? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:06PM (#6449553) Homepage Journal
      Sure this is great if you're doing simulations or animating/rendering stuff . But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal? How will this affect network security?

      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)

        by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:21PM (#6449647) Homepage Journal
        Sure this is great if you're doing simulations or animating/rendering stuff . But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal? How will this affect network security?

        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.

        • Yeah I know, people who read slashdot aren't Joe Schmoe.

          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?

      • I guess I had better leave, huh? :)
    • "Grid Computing" is directed at large-scale, secure resource sharing. An ordinary surfer will have little interest in this.

      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

      • "Grid Computing" is directed at large-scale, secure resource sharing. An ordinary surfer will have little interest in this.

        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
        • 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?

          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)

      by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:49PM (#6449798) Homepage
      "But for Joe Schmoe who surfs the web and reads his e-mail, what's the big deal?"

      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.

    • true, for most average uses grid computing isnt reasonable. there is a big group of average users that will benefit from it: GAMERS. 3D games can completely use it. it would take the normal hardware cycle and totally obliterate it. once you implement grid computing into console form you will see the benefit for average users.
    • I imagine it could affect network security by making it easier for crackers to gain enough computing power to crack encryption schemes.

  • You mean (Score:5, Funny)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:04PM (#6449543)
    ...that bastard Scott [sun.com] is right?

    The network really is the computer?

    Where'd I put that mousepad......
  • "It was the Woodstock of the grid -- everyone not sleeping for three days, running around naked and shagging in a kind of scientific performance art," said Dr. Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, who was the program chairman for the conference.

    no wonder it took so long to develop.

  • Ah, sweet consent... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Fux the Pengiun ( 686240 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:12PM (#6449591)
    It's about time grid computing become of age. I've been waiting to hit that for years.

    Sincerely,

    A dirty old mainframe

  • Google bigger than whole 1995 Internet . (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fu Ling-Yu ( 688545 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:13PM (#6449600) Homepage Journal
    We did study on size of infrastructure of Internet for demographic studies and thanks to partners at Stanford, found that Google setup now is bigger than the whole Internet in 1995 in terms of machines and total bandwidths. Grid computing definitely works..
  • What would be the difference between Grid Computing and then a "psduedo-cluster" networked together with VPN Tunnels?

    From the article they seem to be basically the same thing. Or am I wrong?
    • Venture Capital.

    • Re:Just a question (Score:2, Insightful)

      by trozan_007 ( 685791 )
      The stuff which makes a "grid" different from a cluster is that the computing and job execution typically spans multiple heterogeneous admin domains.
    • The "Grid" prescibes a standard way of connecting distributed computers for large-scale computing. Sort of like the InterNet didnt really take off until more than 20 years after its inception, when http and browsers became standards.
      • "a standard way of connecting distributed computers for large scale computing" it sounds like some kind of crazy big brother stuff to me... I know, lets break the backs of the laboring client computers in our struggle to find more and more ways to tie up computing cycles--for the good of the people! You need grid computing! And don't forget to drink your milk. Does a body good!
      • Http and browsers were insignificant in the popularization
        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 upgrades every 3 years !

  • Read between the hype.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by djmitche ( 536135 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:30PM (#6449689) Homepage

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      My load average is 3 per day, more if Baywatch is on TV.

    • Re:Read between the hype.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sn00ker ( 172521 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:42PM (#6449762) Homepage
      You're either trolling, or wearing blinkers.
      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.

    • 0.1 is 10% ? Load average is NOT cpu usage.. Hell you could bring it to "300%" if you compiled a few things at the same time..
      • Hell, I've seen a load average of over 100 on a single CPU SPARCstation 20. That was painful.

        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.

    • This is a funny post.
      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
      • What, tail fins? What use are those? Hula hoops? Coon
        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)

      by cranos ( 592602 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @02:12AM (#6450403) Homepage Journal
      Let me guess, you thought 640k was all anyone would need? Or maybe there would only be a market for 5 computers in the world.

      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)

      by YoJ ( 20860 )
      I think grid computing is way overdue. I am not disparaging the current researchers in the field. Resource sharing and management has been with computers from day one (one of the quotes from the talk is from 1969). Ever since I discovered PovRay (it was DKB or something back then) I have been waiting for fast computers available for my use without muss or fuss. I'm still waiting.

  • oh my god... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jx100 ( 453615 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:38PM (#6449736)
    SKYNET LIVES!!!!
  • For more info on porgramming for grid computing try MPI or LSF/NQE/PBSPro

    Rus

  • PS3 spreads grid to the masses (Score:3, Informative)

    by yelohbird ( 658476 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:53PM (#6449820) Homepage
    With the upcoming PS3 carrying out grid computing [com.com], there's no stopping for this technology reaching out to the masses, even those who don't know it!

  • personally (Score:4, Informative)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asv@nOspam.ivoss.com> on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @12:04AM (#6449879) Homepage Journal
    I prefer the term distributed computing, why did distributed computing turn in to grid computing?
    • Distributed computing is the warp. Grid computing is distributed computing that also has a weft. Can't explain it any simpler then that. I had an usage example but it is related to a project that I am currently involved in that I realy can't discouse.

    • Re:personally (Score:5, Informative)

      by groover mctasty ( 613990 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:08AM (#6450575)
      I have spent some time reading "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure" by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, as well as the OGSA/OGSA standards being worked on by the Global Grid Frome . This is how I make the distinction.

      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)

      by Brane ( 210649 )
      The GRID [web.cern.ch] is a project that started at CERN [www.cern.ch] (The guys who invented the WWW [web.cern.ch]) to analyse data from the Large Hadron Collider experiment(s).

      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)

    by pjdepasq ( 214609 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @12:37AM (#6450059)
    I just recently heard that here at Virginia Tech we are getting a (massive?) grid comprised of some of the first dual-processor G5s rolling off the assembly line at Apple. The number of machines? I believe it was in the 1100 range.

    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)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @12:52AM (#6450124) Homepage
    Look who's pushing the idea - companies in desperate need of a new revenue model.

    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)

      by groover mctasty ( 613990 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:14AM (#6450594)
      Who's pushing this idea is researchers. Witness the TeraGrid, the BioGrid, the Fermilab ACP. Companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and HP, are simply involved because they are convinced there will be a larger market in the future. These companies have done quite well with the current "revenue model".

      If you don't believe me, check out .

    • I disagree that this is a total waste of time.

      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.

    • Look who's pushing the idea - companies in desperate need of a new revenue model.

      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

    • 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.

      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

      • No, you can't. Just try finding an ISP that would risk disrupting their systems to let you do that.

        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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @01:58AM (#6450353)
    IBM, as well as other companies and organizations, is working on the Globus project and there are different scenarios out there. One of which is online gaming (butterfly.net). There are others, but right now, it's mainly scientific based. For the people who know, the Globus toolkit just reached version 3. This is important to know because this version is OGSA/OGSI (in draft) compliant which is an open standard describing the communication between the grid nodes (WSDL, WSDD, XML, etc). The grid is different from clusters and the grid is different from p2p computing. One view on the grid is use of remote resources. For instance, you can use en electron microscope remotely. Perhaps even with the DaVinci surgical machine, it would be possible to perform (minor) surgery remotely. The advantages of this are obvious. A specialist can help more people since it cuts on travel time. In my view, the grid cannot be applied to a certain solution meaning the grid isn't supposed to be for a certain problem, but rather, a new avenue to do things. With this in mind, the grid will grow according to how we think of using it. The Internet is an example of this type of growth. Furthermore, the grid is probably geared towards businesses and other backend operations. Later, perhaps, it'll become more of on online service directory in which you can find resources to do you work; printing facility, specialized resource use (super/quantum computers), and other things. Again, the grid will grow will become what we need it to be (even if we cannot predict it).

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Also, Globus is open source and the services are written in Java. I just love this stuff.

  • Premature reorts of the grid's demise... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jfabermit ( 688258 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @02:38AM (#6450474)
    I really think the people complaining about not personally having a use for grid computing are completely missing the point. As long as enough people have a use for it, it will be useful. Having done a good number of calculations on a few different supercomputers, I can think of nothing that the grid currently offers to me...but I'm sure the people who run many-hundred processor jobs on a regular basis have a different perspective. For a while, the grid might be the plaything of big scientific and industrial computational projects, but has any technological advancement like this ever not caught on. Eventually, someone will figure out a new idea, only possible on a grid, which involves porn, gaming, or the ability to transfer media files in a manner of questionable legality, and soon kids will be asking what life was like without it back in the dark ages. A little patience, people, give the geniuses and madmen (not necessarily mutually exclusive) a little time to work...

  • Software for URLs? (Score:3, Funny)

    by subreality ( 157447 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:50AM (#6450704)
    ... software for the use of URL's, HTML, and HTTP ...
    I think I heard someone refer to it as a "web browser" once.
  • Clustering is to Grid (or distributed)
    as
    LAN is to WAN

    or am I just fooling myself?
  • "Grid" computing has been around for decades. People have been doing useful work with arrays of systems for a long time, both in the commercial and academic areas.

    • Perhaps I'm oversimplifying but to me it looks like grid computing is a almagamation of web services and clustering. Shared resources, directory knows which machines are capable of which jobs, yadda yadda yadda.

  • A Way Forward for Grid Computing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by npch ( 53012 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @05:59AM (#6451050)
    I've been working in the Grid Computing area for the last two and a half years, and would like to make a stand for all of us who aren't just worried about bigger supercomputers.

    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)

    by Mandelbrute ( 308591 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @06:24AM (#6451138)
    Use those unused CPU cycles in the search for disappearing African Uranium!
  • As a student I have my disk space regulated, am I soon to have my CPU time regulated (this used to happen). I don't know whether I would end up with more CPU time available to me for a project or less?
  • Yes yes it's off topic, but after having seen T3 it has been bugging the hell out of me that at the end of the movie John said that there was no central computer for Skynet, but instead it had spread into thousands of machines on the internet. Isn't that fantastic!

    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
  • You could have read Ian Foster writing about grid computing in April's Scientific American. If you can't find a copy, try sciam.com

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