The Hindu Business Line : Do grids hold answers to grand challenges?

BASED on ``1,466 interviews with senior IT influencers and decision makers'', Oracle has found that India leads the world in the big jump of 52 per cent on the `Grid Index'.

While China has moved from 4.7 to 4.9, Italy from 4 to 4.2, Korea from 4.4 to 4.7, and Spain from 4.2 to 4.5, India leaped from 2.9 to 4.4, as one learns from a recent press release on www.oracle.com. A happy thought, that is, though the global average is 5.2, and `the Nordics, South-East Asia and the US continue to lead the rest of the world on the Grid journey'.

But what is grid computing? It is "a large system of networked computers whose processing power used to solve difficult and time-consuming problems," defines http://dictionary.reference.com, citing Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English.

"A form of networking," defines www.pcwebopaedia.com. "Unlike conventional networks that focus on communication among devices, grid computing harnesses unused processing cycles of all computers in a network for solving problems too intensive for any stand-alone machine." Grid computing requires special software, unique to the computing project. The phrase `grid computing' originated in the early 1990s as a metaphor for making computer power as easy to access as an electric power grid, says http://en.wikipedia.org.

Grid computing is "the fashionable new term for a networking system once more commonly called distributed computing," writes Michael Quinion on www.worldwidewords.org. "The basic idea is that instead of running a program on one big computer, you run it on a lot of quite small computers connected through a network."

He mentions the SETI@Home project as an example. "SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth," explains http://setiathome.berkeley.edu. "One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology."

The project used "a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers." On December 15, 2005, however, they "turned off the server of SETI@home Classic, ending the largest computation in history". An earlier grid-computing project was GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. It was formed in January 1996 to discover new world-record-size Mersenne primes. "GIMPS harnesses the power of thousands of small computers like yours to search for these `needles in a haystack'," says www.mersenne.org.

"On December 15, 2005, Dr Curtis Cooper and Dr Steven Boone, professors at Central Missouri State University, discovered the 43rd Mersenne Prime, 2{+3}{+0}{+,}{+4}{+0}{+2}{+,}{+4}{+5}{+7}-1." The largest known prime number that is 9,152,052 digits long is available from `Perfectly Scientific' as "an over-sized poster in 1-point font... for the serious math nut."

A November 2005 article, by Steve Ranger on News.com is titled, `World's biggest grid seeks secrets of the universe'. It speaks of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being constructed at CERN (`the world's largest particle physics laboratory') near Geneva, expected to be the largest scientific instrument on the planet, requiring hugely powerful computing "to process the 15 petabytes of data that it will produce each year."

Wikipedia mentions protein folding, earthquake simulation, research into drugs for cancer, and climate models as other `Grand Challenge problems' that have been put through grid computing. "Most of these projects work by running as a screensaver on users' personal computers, which process small pieces of the overall data while the computer is either completely idle or lightly used."

Grids can be functionally classified as computational grids with a focus on `computationally-intensive operations'; data grids for `the controlled sharing and management of large amounts of distributed data'; and equipment grids with `a primary piece of equipment, example a telescope' and a surrounding grid `to analyse the data produced'.

There is the Global Grid Forum (GGF) working for "the pervasive adoption of grid computing worldwide" because it believes that grids will lead to "new discoveries, new opportunities, and better business practices". The forum's site www.ggf.org informs that the GGF community consists of "thousands of individuals in industry and research, representing over 400 organizations in more than 50 countries".

Enterprise Grid Alliance (www.gridalliance.org) is also working towards developing enterprise grid solutions and accelerating the deployment of grid computing. After unveiling `industry's first reference model, roadmap for grid computing,' the Alliance has released `grid security requirements v1.0' to arm users "with information needed to evaluate and make informed risk management decisions as they deploy enterprise grids".

Yet another group is the Globus Alliance (www.globus.org), "a community of organisations and individuals developing fundamental technologies behind the `Grid,' which lets people share computing power, databases, instruments, and other on-line tools securely across corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy." Yet, cultural issues can pose a major hurdle in any grid exercise.

The Alliance's homepage informs that computational scientists at Brown University are using the Globus Toolkit to simulate the flow of blood through human arteries. A link leads to www.teragrid.org, the site of "an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at eight partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource". It speaks of "40 teraflops of computing power and nearly two petabytes of rotating storage, and specialised data analysis and visualisation resources into production, interconnected at 10-30 gigabits/second via a dedicated national network."

Do you know that Google invites help for its `Compute' programme (http://toolbar.google.com) so that your computer can "work on complex problems when it would otherwise be idle". The first beneficiary of Google Compute effort is Folding@home, "a non-profit research project at Stanford University that is trying to understand the structure of proteins so they can develop better treatments for a number of illnesses".

Don't forget that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page studied in Stanford. Their alma mater earned $336 million from Google stock, as Lisa M. Krieger informs in a December 2005 story on www.mercurynews.com.

The project's site http://folding.stanford.edu informs that since October 1, 2000, over 1 million CPUs (central processing units) throughout the world have participated in Folding@Home. "Each additional CPU gives us an added boost in performance, allowing us to tackle more difficult problems or solve existing research faster or more accurately."

The latest issue of GRIDtoday (http://news.taborcommunications.com) reports about Singapore's `SG@Schools Program', which involves students in the efforts "to generate interesting solutions to solve computationally intensive problems in science and engineering by harnessing the enormous amount of processing cycles achieved through aggregating the available PCs in schools".

There is a list of grid computing sites on www.ic.uff.br, which can do with current data. "Grid computing is an emerging way of keeping millions of gamers in China happy and satisfied, as they play online games," reports Erwin Lemuel Oliva on http://news.inq7.net, in a story dated December 11, 2005, citing an Oracle executive.

But grid gaming isn't new. For, in February 2003, IBM and Butterfly activated "a first-of-its-kind computing grid that allows online game developers to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of PlayStation 2 by more efficiently provisioning resources to meet the demands of console gamers," as www-1.ibm.com informs.

The grid computing industry today is roughly at the same stage the Internet was about 10 years ago, writes Martin LaMonica on http://news.com.com in an April 2005 article. "The exact definition of computing grids is hazy, though people typically use the term to describe a network where many individual computers coordinate their work, like a well-organised ant colony."

If the haze cleared and the `ants' worked to seamlessly unite the computers of the world on a grid, so that the machines chipped in with their chips' idle time, to take on the toughest challenges, the next form of society may well be called a gridocracy.

ZeroBase@TheHindu.co.in

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