What Is Grid Computing, Anyway?

One good way to gauge a new technology's degree of acceptance is to observe whether it has moved out of the laboratory and onto store shelves -- from science to commerce. According to that measure, grid computing is just coming of age.

Often called the next big thing in global Internet technology, grid computing employs clusters of locally or remotely networked machines to work on specific computational projects.

One well-known example of grid computing -- sometimes called distributed or clustered computing -- is the ongoing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ( news - web sites)) project, in which thousands of users are sharing their unused processor cycles to help search for signs of "rational" signals from outer space.

Grid computing traditionally has been useful to researchers working on scientific or technical problems -- much like the SETI project -- that require a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.

But while this technology was once exclusively the province of academics in fields like biomedicine and weather forecasting, it has recently been making a strong foray into potentially lucrative e-commerce sectors. Although clustering has been used for several years as a load-balancing technique by server hardware manufacturers, grid computing now seems to be coming of age for other applications as well.

"Grid computing has advanced to the point now that there are products out there like Sun's Grid Engine Enterprise Edition," Aberdeen Group analyst Bill Claybrook told NewsFactor.

Much like a load-balancing server cluster, Sun's Grid Engine software lets organizations create networked grids to share resources on a wider scale and to allocate processing resources according to department priorities.

Essentially, grids are built from clusters of computer servers joined together over a local area network (LAN) or over the Internet.

While several grids that run over the Internet -- like the SETI project -- have been built with proprietary software, there are several development tools that can facilitate the growth and adoption of grid computing.

One of those tools is Globus, a research and development project focused on helping software developers apply the grid concept.

The Globus toolkit, the group's primary offering, is a set of components that can be used to develop grid applications. For each component in the toolkit, Globus provides an API (application programmer interface) for use by software developers.

Research scientists historically have been attracted to grid computing because it uses the power of idle computers to work on difficult computational problems.

Proponents of grid computing say the technology will enable universities and research institutions to share their supercomputers, servers and storage capacity, allowing them to perform massive calculations quickly and relatively cheaply.

In line with those expectations, HP recently announced that a 9.2-teraflop supercomputer soon will be connected to the Department of Energy ( news - web sites)'s Science Grid. When installed, it will be the largest supercomputer attached to a grid anywhere in the world, according to the company.

Until now, the problem with grid computing has been a lack of common software for developers to work with, largely because grids rely on Internet-based software.

In an effort to spur broader adoption of grids, the National Science Foundation ( news - web sites) established the US$12.1 million Middleware Initiative last year, and the agency has recently released software and other tools designed to make working on grids easier for scientists and engineers.

"Scientists are now sharing data and instrumentation on an unprecedented scale, and other geographically distributed groups are beginning to work together in ways that were previously impossible," according to the Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support Center.

In a real-world example of grid computing, IBM ( NYSE: IBM - news) and Butterfly.net announced in May that they would soon release a computing grid for the video game industry. Butterfly.net spent two years building the grid, which distributes games across a network of server farms using IBM e-business infrastructure technology.

Massively multiplayer games (MMGs) historically have been run on mirrored servers that essentially duplicate copies of the MMG universe to balance user loads.

While this technique is designed to reduce latency for all users -- so that each set of servers behaves responsively to user actions -- the mirroring technique limits the number of players who can participate at one time in the same game universe.

When load balances increase, the typical MMG response has been to add more servers, copy the game universe and spill the extra load into that new copy.

Now, however, Butterfly.net's grid technology provides "cross-server sentinels" that supports the interaction of millions of players in one world, with server boundaries invisible to players. According to the company, the extension of grid computing to the gaming world lets game developers support a limitless number of users in their MMGs.

Companies are lining up to jump on the Butterfly bandwagon. This week, for example, software development site CollabNet announced it will work with Butterfly.net to develop an online environment that lets game developers test their games.

"IBM's been extremely busy on a number of fronts in grid, in terms of investing resources and winning new partners and customers," IBM spokesperson Jim Larkin told NewsFactor.

"Butterfly is one of the key examples thus far of how IBM has worked with another company to help develop a computing grid that is in the commercial arena," Larkin said. "It's a clear example of how grid is taking hold of an industry."

Maybe the Butterfly endeavor will help the Telecom companies with all of their excess of black fiber!

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"What Is Grid Computing, Anyway?"

Just someone who wants to wear out your computer for free while you are sleeping.

Good one, the ole hard drives only have so many hours in them!

I want my machine sleeping when I am!

Forget SETI. Try United Devices, Inc. They distribute a program called UD Agent that uses your unused processor cycles to test cancer-fighting drugs. I've had UD Agent installed and running on my computer for about 9 months, and no performance degradation is noticeable. (having a 1.4Ghz P4 helps)

If you want more info, go to http://members.ud.com/projects/cancer/

>holds chest<

Weezy!

I just built a nice box with a 2 GHz processor and was going to take a look at the program for cancer-fighting drugs. My wife is a 20 + year Cancer Survivor with late stage breast cancer having gone to the bone so we are very anxious for additional drugs to attack Cancer being approved by the FDA!.

Now that is another huge topic, the FDA drug approval cycle!

To anyone signing up at United Devices, FreeRepublic has a group there. When signing up you can join up rather easily.

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