re: National Computing Grid
It seems to me that we were discussing something very similar to this about a month ago in the background. From Network World Fusion:
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What if you could harness computing power from around the world and use
it right at your desktop? Imagine the applications you could roll out
or the complex network problems you could solve. In their In the Works
column this week, Tim Kuhfuss and Rick Stevens of the Argonne National
Laboratory look at the Grid, an ambitious effort to create a universal
source of computing power, similar to the power grids that now keep
your lights on.
nwfusion.com
The Grid
Gathering the nation's computing resources.
By Tim Kuhfuss and Rick
Stevens
Network World, 12/20/99
What if you could harness
computing power from around the world and use it
right at your desktop? Imagine the applications you
could roll out or the complex network problems you
could solve.
Well, a project on tap here at Argonne National
Laboratory is aimed at creating these opportunities for
you. The Computational Grid will connect multiple
regional grids to create a universal source of
computing power.
The Grid project can be thought of the computer's
answer to the power grid. With the power grid, a
series of electric resource aggregator is hooked
together to create a single picture of the nation's
power supply. The Grid will function in much the
same way. Users can tap into the Grid's resources to
power high-level applications and services.
The idea for the Grid emerged in the university and
national laboratories back in 1991. Researchers
conducting metacomputing experiments linked
multiple supercomputers to create a large virtual
machine. They used that supermachine to attack
problems too large for any one computer to handle.
The computers that made up this distributed virtual
machine were connected over high-speed networks
such as the NSFnet, a precursor to the Internet.
The success of some of the early metacomputing
experiments led researchers to believe that connecting
additional types of high-performance devices such as
virtual reality systems, telescopes, electron
microscopes, or terabyte-scale data archives via
common high-performance Internet based networks
would provide amazing results.
After prototyping dozens of distributed
high-performance applications on ad hoc test beds, it
became apparent that many of the same software
services and functions were needed by multiple
applications. In each case, the application was having
to solve the same problems, including authentication in
a distributed multidomain environment, remote access
to data without the benefit of a common namespace,
lack of network performance interfaces, and a lack of
high-performance wide-area data transport interfaces.
Creating a collection of services to address these
problems would benefit many applications, the
researchers thought. So from this work sprung the
layer of service that forms the middleware layer of the
Grid.
The Grid lets the network act as the conduit of
advanced applications delivery. For instance, a user
can harness a diverse set of computational,
informational, collaborative and possibly
remote-controlled systems to build an application.
These applications could range from simulation-based
design of products to distributed data mining to sales
presentations stocked with virtual reality demos.
Many of these high-level services use common
middleware such as public key infrastructure, data
security, distributed resource management, directory
services, resource brokering services, and distributed
resource scheduling.
But the Grid has some challenges ahead. First, the
Internet Engineering Task Force needs to develop
and approve standards that account for advanced
middleware capabilities.
We also need large-scale test beds that can validate
the Grid concept with real applications and real users.
From there will spring a way for everyone to channel
information from the Grid. Already, this is beginning to
happen with the federal government's
Next-Generation Internet program and
university-driven Internet 2 project. Even the
commercial sector is noticing the opportunity for new
business applications and markets based on advanced
networking services.
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