Daniel Brookshier's Blog

Where's the Grid?

Comments

• in the datacenter
  Most of the grid work we see is happening in the secure/controlled datacenter, not "on unused cycles of PCs running a screensaver." These servers are harnessed for their compute capabilities, and relatively effective because of the high bandwidth available for internode communications. (Theoretically, the compute:bandwidth requirements ratio determines the scalable effectiveness of a grid.)

  We have a handful of customers already using grids for real-world problems. Often they use a product like "Platform" or "Data Synapse" (etc.) to manage the grid, and a product like ours (Tangosol Coherence) to manage application state (data) and grid execution across the nodes.

  Depending on the application (obviously) they can see significant performance improvements and/or cost savings, depending what it is they are replacing or comparing to. Grid computing doesn't have that many applications tailor-made to show its benefits, but the few that we have been involved with have been beautiful examples of how grid computing can provide a "black box" (high reliability / availability) that spits out end results much more quickly (10x, 100x, sometimes more) than the massive boxen (e.g. 32 CPUs, 64 CPUs) that they are replacing, and do so at a fraction of the cost.

  Peace,

  Cameron Purdy
  Tangosol, Inc.

  Posted by: cpurdy on September 15, 2003 at 09:54 AM

• My Grid usage...
  Its sort of a fun project that gets delayed and delayed; but it would be nice to share anyhow.

  I designed a project that allows a VCR that happens to be running Linux to start a (jxpa) server and offer services like an overview of videos it has stored and controls like play, pause etc.
  My laptop and workstation would run a server that provides a service like listening to error messages (almost out of diskspace!) and will mostly be used to control the VCR when connected to all the other servers.
  My always-running-server would be providing services like a TV Guide (fed from the web), and something like a "Big Disk" service that allows backupping.

  This is a project I came up with after reading a paper that basically explained for the first time very well that all those distributed.net clones are just brushing the featureset, and soo much more is possible :)

  Cheers!
  

  Posted by: zander on September 15, 2003 at 10:14 AM

• A VCR or a PVR?
  Do you mean a PVR (personal video recorder) like Tivo, or do you actually mean a Linux powered VCR (Video Casette Recorder)?

  Posted by: jimothy on September 15, 2003 at 11:21 AM

• A VCR or a PVR?
  A PVR like this one:
  http://freevo.sourceforge.net/

  Posted by: zander on September 16, 2003 at 08:57 AM

• JNGI
  We are using and particpating at a JXTA project called JNGI (jngi.jxta.org). It is exactly what we want for grid computing : fully distributed, high redudancy, portable (Java) and ease to write parallel programs.
  JNGI takes into account the volatility of the computing nodes and organizes computational resources
  into groups, so that inter-node communication does not occur in a
  one-to-all or all-to-all mode, thereby limiting the scalability of the
  system.
  JNGI 2.11 has been released so now use it !

  Julien Bourgeois
  http://lifc.univ-fcomte.fr/~bourgeoi/
  

  Posted by: julien on December 12, 2003 at 06:55 PM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.