Mass Grid Computing Around the Corner?
Mass Grid Computing Around the Corner?转自：http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/18/0422235
主题：你身边有很多网格计算吗?
概述：关于用什么来刺激网格和分布式计算的论述
出自：《Slashdot》
发表时间：2004年5月18日
内容：
Mass Grid Computing Around the Corner?
Posted by Cliff on Tue May 18, '04 07:02 AM
from the using-your-spare-cycles dept.
zoglmannk asks: "I've become interested in grid computing. A lot has happened since the last time that I looked at it several years ago during the SETI@home heyday. Now several public supported grid applications are coming to fruit: climate modeling, cancer research, protein folding, smallpox therapies, fighting bioterrorism, mersenne prime search, evolution, SETI, and others. All of these have public interest to make a better world. Is mass adoption of public interest grid computing just around the corner? Is there really a need for a majority of those spare CPU cycles? Or is there more computing power than can reasonably be used for the types of problems that can be distributed to home and educational PCs? What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses? More education, advertisement, prizes, reimbursement?"
No spare cycles (Score:2)
by rice_web (604109) on Tuesday May 18, @07:03AM (#9181770)
(http://homepage.mac.com/rice_web/ | Last Journal: Monday May 10, @10:35PM)
I can assure you that there are presently no spare cycles..... of the people that even know that these projects exist. Okay, fine, I myself could run Folding @ Home on another two machines, and I'm sure the case is true in even many geeks homes. However, geeks represent a small number of people, and many that I've talked to have no idea that this is even possible.
The mass grid computing market just got saturated.
Cluster maybe, in a couple of years (Score:3, Interesting)
by Kris_J (10111) * on Tuesday May 18, @07:15AM (#9181852)
(http://krisjohn.atari.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 19, @10:29PM)
I don't know about grid computing, but the little Dell PCs we have in our computer labs will start coming out of lease in a couple of year's time. I know they're "identical" because I manage them with Ghost. I'm seriously tempted to get 10 or so then and try to build my own cluster. They even have Gigabit ethernet built-in. Some cat 6 cable, a 12-port switch, a few powerboards, one master with a screen... I just need something worth doing with them.
Re:Cluster maybe, in a couple of years by Blittzed (Score:1) Wednesday May 19, @01:06AM
What is needed? (Score:1)
by Kardamon (54123) on Tuesday May 18, @07:17AM (#9181857)
What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses?
We need more hype .
[ Last edited by 碧城仙 on 2004-11-17 at 12:32 PM ] An easy reward... (Score:2, Informative)
by WordODD (706788) <dheath@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 18, @07:19AM (#9181883)
(http://wordodd.com/)
Most of these projects allow you to join teams and obtain stats based on your computer's performance and the performance of your team as a whole. The collection of these stats seems to be a successful method of motivating and rewarding the participants and best of all it takes minimal time, effort and almost no other resources away from the main project.
Distributed != Grid (Score:3, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 18, @07:55AM (#9182184)
Grid computing is not the same thing as distributed computing. You are talking about distributed computing.
Here is a pdf describing what grid computing is.
Heating systems (Score:3, Funny)
by ballpoint (192660) on Tuesday May 18, @08:22AM (#9182525)
(http://slashdot.org/)
With the ever increasing energy prices and power consumption of CPUs it might make sense to develop a electric heating apparatus (a radiator) that, instead of resistors, contains 32 *iums or *ons inside for a 'cool' 3KW of heating power.
Link them to a fast internet connection, pay a fraction of the heatees' power bills and you're in business for CPU intensive, network extensive grid applications.
Re:Heating systems by Councilor Hart (Score:2) Tuesday May 18, @09:09AM
Distributed, Grid and how they differ (Score:5, Interesting)
by basking2 (233941) on Tuesday May 18, @08:46AM (#9182793)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Most (all?) of the cited examples are ditributed computation projects. Most have agents that call up a server and signout work to do.
The vision of grid computing is to treat computation power like electrical power. Where there is demand, the computation power "flows" and "fills" that demand.
For example, a simple example is that you have a webserver cluster, a database cluster, and a network area storage cluster, all made up of off-of-the-shelf PCs. If demand for database logic goes up and stays up, one of the computers being used for redundant storage could STOP replicating data and START being a database server. If the web requests go up, one of the database computers could stop handling database requests and start handling web requests.
Obviously, there are hard limits that must be met. We must have at least 1 web server, 1 database server, and enough storage machines to keep our data safe. We also have to detect failure or excess load and have a transition path for the generic computer to change what computational task it helps with.
Amazing stuff, and if you ponder the details of it, it is a bit of a challenge!! As another poster mentioned before, this does relate to self-healing technology and it also does relate to the distributed computing projects you mentioned in your post.
Hope this is helpful. 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
Check out OGSA (Score:4, Interesting)
by jonasmit (560153) on Tuesday May 18, @09:01AM (#9182948)
I agree with what others have said Grid Computing is distinct from other forms of distributed computing.
Check out OGSA - the Open Grid Services Architecture - and learn what is and is not a Grid. This is the de facto standard for building Grids.
Even new products that are *sold* with Grid in their title aren't necessarly THE GRID though they might be A GRID.
Grid Grammar by ear1grey (Score:1) Wednesday May 19, @06:30AM
semantic grid (Score:1)
by fraccy (780466) on Tuesday May 18, @09:16AM (#9183135)
(http://tim.fracsoft.com/)
Traditional grid computing stemmed from the science community which had specific needs to both collaborate across heterogeneous administrative domains, and to process increasingly large amounts of data (often at a budget). This vision has been increased to incorporate the ultimate goal of distributed computing, in which total global processing, storage, and computing resources in general can be seen as effectively a single entity. The problems in addressing this are huge and a major focus of software research. Grid computing systems as they are today tend to be only usable by relative experts, and it is still sometime before the average user will find themselves able to regularly harness such power - something which must happen before widespread use. Supporting such complexity requires increasing automation in the self-management of systems, which requires better representation of data and processes in terms of semantics. Ultimately the future of the web and grid computing are likely to collide into what some term as "ubiquitous computing". See www.semanticgrid.org for some more info.
exploit (Score:5, Funny)
by lcde (575627) on Tuesday May 18, @09:25AM (#9183246)
(http://www.nsgcorp.net/)
What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses?
A new microsoft exploit :D
Apple QMaster, XGrid (Score:2)
by sakusha (441986) on Tuesday May 18, @10:03AM (#9183658)
Like I've been saying for quite a while, Apple finally announced that all their Pro AV products will support distributed processing with QMaster. Currently Shake, Compressor, and Maya are supported, soon Final Cut Pro support will be added. Everyone will go nuts once they see the performance of FCP with distributed processing.
And then there's XGrid, designed for cooperative processing in scientific tasks. I haven't used it so I can't judge its utility.
Yep, Apple is leading the way with this sort of Grid Computing software. This is what you can do with a bit of your own proprietary software built on top of Open Source unix. And I don't see any reason why people couldn't extend QMaster and XGrid support to other platforms, creating a compatible OSS version.
Re:Apple QMaster, XGrid by sakusha (Score:2) Thursday May 20, @07:02AM
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
distributed.net ? (Score:2, Interesting)
by scythian (46974) on Tuesday May 18, @01:59PM (#9187044)
(http://terpmotors.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 12, @12:02PM)
Did you forget to mention distributed.net ?
They have been doing this for years ... OGR, DES, RC5, CSC ... dare I say the biggest one ever, except for the ueber-d.net-geeks who had to choose SETI. :)
money (Score:3, Interesting)
by bcrowell (177657) on Tuesday May 18, @03:09PM (#9188046)
(http://www.lightandmatter.com/)
I expect that fairly soon there will be an efficient market for CPU cycles. That might help to offset the cost of a new machine, but it will also probably have the effect of killing off the donation-based projects like SETI@home.
Is there really a need for a majority of those spare CPU cycles? Or is there more computing power than can reasonably be used for the types of problems that can be distributed to home and educational PCs?
It doesn't take much creativity to think of ways you could use up ridiculously large amounts of cpu power. In the relatively near future, I can imagine:
spammers paying people to compute hashcash postage
online gamers paying for rendering of Pixar-quality animation
For the more distant future, a lot of really difficult AI problems might become more tractable if you could throw enough CPU power at them. Neurobiologists can already simulate the nervous systems of very simply organisms; maybe at some point it will become possible to simulate a human brain directly.
Re:money by ear1grey (Score:1) Wednesday May 19, @04:07AM
Spare cycles no longer exist.... (Score:3, Insightful)
by decep (137319) on Tuesday May 18, @06:20PM (#9190546)
Most modern CPUs no longer "waste" spare CPU cycles like they once did.
If your CPU runs at 100%, you are using more power and therefore makes your electric bill increase. Therefore, when you run distributed applications, you are actually paying $$$ for what you are giving away.
In recent history, laptop CPUs have started throttling themselves and using even less power, and desktop CPUs will start doing the same before long.
Not that this has that much to do with grid computing...
Grid computings goal is usually greater utilization of your own resources...distriuted computing usually utilizes someone elses resources. :-) (I know, true and not true at the same time)
Re:Spare cycles no longer exist.... by excaliber19 (Score:1) Tuesday May 18, @07:44PM
The masses. (Score:2, Insightful)
by ear1grey (697747) on Wednesday May 19, @02:22AM (#9193235)
(http://boakes.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 28, @07:52AM)
zoglmannk asked:
What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses? More education, advertisement, prizes, reimbursement?
Grid computing is not aimed at "the masses". Most of the research is concentrating on building systems for solving problems which normal people have no interest in.
That's not to say that we plebs won't benefit from a "cure for X" or "lower oil prices due to better flow models within pipelines" or even "more efficient cars desgined in simulated air tunnels"; we are just very unlikely to be the imediate user of the computing power.
always had this question about clusters... (Score:2)
by BigGerman (541312) on Wednesday May 19, @03:03PM (#9197995)
so maybe someone will enlighten me.
If you build a cluster, among other things, you pay premium for:
high density server components;
major cooling and power.
Now if I use gigabit for the transport, can't I just distribute my boxes throughout the building so they can breathe easily? Re:always had this question about clusters... by rmkent (Score:1) Thursday May 20, @10:33AM
Costs beyond electricity? (Score:2, Interesting)
by SecState (667211) on Thursday May 20, @10:53AM (#9204659)
Slightly off-topic, but I've long wondered whether running one of these programs decreases the lifespan of a computer. Do the excess heat and months of constant usage take a toll on the processor and other components? My P3/900 laptop, for one, sure gets hot when I run Folding@Home.
Re:Costs beyond electricity? by Bandrew (Score:1) Thursday May 20, @11:18PM
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