 |
|
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JULY 14, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 28
|
Special Features:
EUROPEAN GRID GROWING
FAST
Scientists in Geneva will soon begin one of the biggest developments in
global
communication. They will announce that 10 laboratories around the world,
including one near Didcot in Oxfordshire, can now talk to each other through
their computers.
This may not seem revolutionary, but this small step for computer kind
marks
the launch of a new technological concept -- the next generation of the Web.
It is called the grid, and scientists say that before long it will change
everything we do -- from scientific research to business to tackling fires to
booking holidays, and even to the way we watch and craft movies.
Currently, the internet consists of huge servers which contain information
on
Web pages that is then downloaded onto computers. As a user, you are limited
in what you can do with that information by how much memory or processing
power your own computer has.
Under the grid, the power of your machine -- all those gigabytes, RAM and
gigahertz -- will become irrelevant. No matter how primitive and cheap your
computer, you will have access to more power than currently exists in the
Pentagon.
"You just say I want this information and the grid is set up so that it
goes
out and collects that for you and makes it accessible," says Roger Cashmore,
director of research at the European particle physics laboratory (Cern) near
Geneva.
The backbone of the grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of
PCs
linked together. Users will be able to use the programs, processing power or
the storage they need as if it all existed on their own computer. And it is
seamless -a user could be sitting tapping into their handheld on a train in
England, using an application on a computer in the US and storing files in
Thailand and still have unlimited computer power at their disposal.
It will be a while before the grid has any impact on our lives. Like the
Web,
the grid is being developed to help scientific research. Cern is currently
building the large hadron collider (LHC), an enormous microscope to
investigate the properties of matter. The LHC will produce phenomenal amounts
of data as it accelerates protons to near the speed of light and smashes them
together. Over a year, it will produce some 500-800 million gigabytes of data.
It would take a pile of CDs the height of the Eiffel tower to store that, says
Mr Cashmore. To make any use of this mountain of information, scientists need
a way to analyse and filter out what is useful and what can be tossed aside.
To do that, huge quantities of computing power are needed. That is where the
grid comes in.
"In a nutshell, the vision [for the grid] is you describe what the input
data
should be, where you want the output to go and what you want to happen on this
data," says Ian Bird, one of those responsible for deploying the grid at Cern.
Once the request has been submitted to the grid, specifically designed
software -- the resource broker -- gets on the job.
The resource broker acts as a user's agent on the network, picking out the
best places to carry out the necessary work at the best prices and making sure
everything runs smoothly. Like stocks and shares, computer power becomes a
commodity: users can buy it whenever they need it.
Bob Jones, a grid project manager who was at Cern when the original Web was
invented, talks of applications in biology -- ever more genomes are being
sequenced producing piles and piles of information. The grid is the perfect
way of analysing and sharing that data, he says.
Like the electrical grid -- which gives the system its name -- the
computing
power will become available on demand. But it is about more than particle
physics.
A small handheld computer, connected by mobile phone to the internet, would
become a supercomputer. Movies could be edited and watched on it. It could
access a word processor that is stored on a computer somewhere in
cyberspace.
For the public to get access to the grid, it needs to be publicly
available.
The European Union is already considering a project to develop a network of
computers available to the public.
In Liverpool yesterday, a $2m European grant was announced to build a
research
centre next to the Catholic cathedral which will develop business uses for the
grid. Dennis Kehoe, Liverpool University's Saxby professor of e-business, says
he is working on ways to use it to solve everyday problems.
"Say you are trying to plan how you deliver beer to all the pubs and clubs
in
the north-west of England or how you deliver social care to all the people in
mid-Wales. Those are incredibly complex scheduling problems," said Professor
Kehoe.
It has other uses, too. Having the power of several supercomputers at its
disposal, a small architecture company could model buildings far more complex
than any technology it could afford now.
An example of the type of application already under consideration is the
proposed FireGrid. Malcolm Atkinson, director of the national e-science centre
in Edinburgh, which is coordinating the effort to develop grid applications in
the UK, says there are two things you need to do quickly in a fire. First,
people have to be evacuated. Second, firefighters need to know where to go, in
and outside the building. If firefighters are getting information from
detectors inside, computers can model how the fire will spread and help
firefighters tackle the blaze.
It took eight years for the internet to catch on, says Bob Jones. This
time,
governments and scientists are already on board, so the results will be seen
far quicker. "It'll be like the Web," said Mr Jones."When you have it you'll
wonder how you ever got by without it."
|