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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
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Applications:
SUN GIVES EQUIPMENT TO SETI'S GRID
COMPUTING PROJECT
The search for extraterrestrial life may be rooted in earth-bound
practicality
after all.
By donating equipment and cash to the Berkeley, Calif-based SETI@Home
project,
which harnesses the power of nearly 600,000 PCs to crunch data from
space-based radio signals, Sun Microsystems Inc is prepping its distributed
(or Grid) computing technology for more grounded uses.
"If you look at the history of the SETI@Home project, they pioneered the
idea
of peer-to-peer Grid computing," says Joerg Schwarz, manager of scientific
computing, global education and research for Sun. "We're not doing this just
for fun or because it's cool; we do have some business motivation as
well."
Sun envisions a future when Grid computing extends beyond the halls of
academia and into more commercial use by companies requiring intense
calculations. Ironically, this transition could make high-end workstations --
such as those Sun sells -- obsolete. Therefore, Sun is hedging its bets and
making a market in Grid computing.
But SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is serious
business.
The organization was founded 19 years ago to scan the heavens for other
beings, but the SETI@Home component is only four years old. SETI@Home gives
individuals the opportunity to download a screensaver bundled with software
that analyzes small pieces of data collected from a radio telescope in
Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
E.T. has not yet been contacted, but Sun's recent donation of servers and
workstations, worth roughly $200,000, brings SETI@Home light years ahead.
Using the equipment provided by Sun, SETI@Home has developed a new software
platform it hopes will hold more promise for scientific inquiry.
The new platform, Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
(BOINC),
supports other research groups interested in using distributed computing, and
also allows SETI@Home to automatically update its software without requiring
users to download new versions.
"We're in a transition period," says David Anderson, director of SETI@Home,
which operates out of the University of California Berkeley campus. "We'll
continue to run the old SETI@Home project and we're overlapping that with our
new version of SETI@Home. So our storage and computing requirements have
increased."
Two additional research projects, with which users of BOINC will be able to
assist, include a program to track climate change and a project studying how
tissues develop out of gene sequences.
In addition to these mostly academic pursuits, analysts and other insiders
believe Grid computing may eventually replace supercomputers in corporations
where extraordinary computing power is needed.
Bruce Caldwell, principle analyst of outsourcing services for research
company
Gartner Inc, believes Grid computing will be mainstream in the next five to
six years for a variety of functions requiring considerable computing power,
including engineering and event forecasting.
Financial institutions, he says, may be among the first commercial adopters
of
Grid computing because such organizations often use proprietary software and
thus are not restricted by licenses.
"It's a way of creating a supercomputer capacity without actually
purchasing
a
supercomputer," Caldwell says. "The issue with Grid computing, at this point,
is that it's practical primarily for home-built applications and scientific
research applications, since there aren't too many licenses for software that
can run in [a distributed] environment."
But Sun is not alone in the distributed computing universe. Other
heavy-hitters active in the technology include IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co,
neither of which returned phone calls by press time.
"When [SETI@Home] started, this was new technology, and we've always been
interested in learning the new developments in the scientific community and
how that can be a general trend in computing," says Sun's Schwarz. "We've
always been saying the network is the computer and, if you will, the super
network is the supercomputer."
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