This thought provoking article by IAN FOSTER starts with a statement: “When the network is as fast as the computer’s internal links, the machine disintegrates across the net into a set of special purpose appliances. — Gilder Technology Report, June 2000.” – The following extract contains verbatim quotes from http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/grid/grid.html#author, to whet the reader’s appetite:
“Internet computing and Grid technologies promise to change the way we tackle complex problems. They will enable large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional boundaries. And harnessing these new technologies effectively will transform scientific disciplines ranging from high-energy physics to the life sciences
One solution to the problem of inadequate computer power is to ‘cluster’ multiple individual computers. This technique, first explored in the early 1980s, is now standard practice in supercomputer centres, research labs and industry. The fastest supercomputers in the world are collections of microprocessors, such as the 8,000-processor ASCI White system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Many research laboratories operate low-cost PC clusters or ‘farms’ for computing or data analysis
Although clustering can provide significant improvements in total computing power, a cluster remains a dedicated facility, built at a single location. Financial, political and technical constraints place limits on how large such systems can become. For example, ASCI White cost $110 million and needed an expensive new building. Few individual institutions or research groups can afford this level of investment…
Rapid improvements in communications technologies are leading many to consider more decentralized approaches to the problem of computing power. There are over 400 million PCs around the world, many as powerful as an early 1990s supercomputer. And most are idle much of the time. Every large institution has hundreds or thousands of such systems. Internet computing seeks to exploit otherwise idle workstations and PCs to create powerful distributed computing systems with global reach and supercomputer capabilities
What does this all mean for science and the scientist? A simplistic view is that scientists with problems amenable to Internet computing now have access to a tremendous new computing resource. All they have to do is cast their problem in a form suitable for execution on home computers — and then persuade the public (or an Internet computing company) that their problem is important enough to justify the expenditure of “free” cycles
But the real significance is broader. Internet computing is just a special case of something much more powerful — the ability for communities to share resources as they tackle common goals. Science today is increasingly collaborative and multidisciplinary, and it is not unusual for teams to span institutions, states, countries and continents. E-mail and the web provide basic mechanisms that allow such groups to work together. But what if they could link their data, computers, sensors and other resources into a single virtual laboratory? So-called Grid technologies seek to make this possible, by providing the protocols, services and software development kits needed to enable flexible, controlled resource sharing on a large scale
The creation of large-scale infrastructure requires the definition and acceptance of standard protocols and services, just as the Internet Protocol (TCP-IP) is at the heart of the Internet. No formal standards process as yet exists for Grids (the Grid Forum is working to create one). Nonetheless, we see a remarkable degree of consensus on core technologies. Essentially all major Grid projects are being built on protocols and services provided by the Globus Toolkit, which was developed by my group at Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with Carl Kesselman’s team at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, and other institutions. This open-architecture and open-source infrastructure provides many of the basic services needed to construct Grid applications such as security, resource discovery, resource management and data access
Although Internet and Grid computing are both new technologies, they have already proven themselves useful and their future looks promising. As technologies, networks and business models mature, I expect that it will become commonplace for small and large communities of scientists to create “Science Grids” linking their various resources to support human communication, data access and computation. I also expect to see a variety of contracting arrangements between scientists and Internet computing companies providing low-cost, high-capacity cycles. The result will be integrated Grids in which problems of different types can be routed to the most appropriate resource: dedicated supercomputers for specialized problems that require tightly coupled processors and idle workstations for more latency tolerant, data analysis problems.”
Read full article at http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/grid/grid.html