Try to harness idle PCs on a network and use them on computationally intensive problems Current supercomputers are too expensive
ASCI White (#1 in TOP500) costs more than $110 and needed a new building
Few institutions or research groups can afford this level of investment
There are more than 500 million PCs around the world
some as powerful as early 90s supercomputers
they are idle most of the time (60% to 90%), even when being used (spreadsheet, typing, printing,...)
corporations and institutions have hundreds or thousands of PCs on their networks
Entropia network
Born in 1997 to apply idle computers worldwide to problems of scientific interest
In 2 years grew to more than 30,000 computers with aggregate speed of over 1 Tflop/second
Several scientific achievements, e.g. Identification of largest known prime number
Gone commercial: www.entropia.com and used for applications from:
Life sciences
Financial services
Product design, etc.
SETI @ home project
Now running on more than ½ million PCs
delivering ~ 1,200 CPU years per day
~ 35 Tflops/sec
fastest (but special-purpose) computer in the world setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
SETI = Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence
Started in 1996 to enlist PCs to work on analysing data from the Arecibo radio telescope
Good mix of popular appeal and good technology
Folding @ home project
www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm Enlists PCs to work on the protein folding problem
most important problem in modern molecular biology
From genome to structure:
Genome sequence of DNA specifies amino acids that make up proteins, but says little about their functions: what is needed is how a protein fold (3D structure)
Protein folding is very fast (microseconds) and complex
Simulation timescale is of the order of nanoseconds
10^3 gap distributed computing
Currently around 20,000 users
Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search
mersenne.org Started in 1996 to find large Mersenne Prime numbers (i.e. primes of the form 2^p – 1)
3, 7, 31, 127, 8191,...are Mersenne primes, corresponding to p=2, 3, 5, 7, 13, ...
Currently 39 Mersenne primes are known; GIMPS found the largest 5:
2^6972593 - 1 found on June 99
2^13466917 - 1 found on November 2001 (current largest; more than 4 million digits)
Are there infinitely many Mersenne primes? Not known
Uses Entropia Network and runs at ~ 3.4 Tflops/sec
More Internet computing projects:
Genome @ home genomeathome.stanford.edu
Compute-against-Cancer www.parabon.com/cac.jsp
Fight AIDS @ home www.fightaidsathome.org
Climate simulation www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk
More Internet computing companies:
Parabon www.parabon.com
United Devices www.uniteddevices.com
See more at www.aspenleaf.com/distributed
The GRID
Internet computing is just a special case of communities sharing resources to tackle common goals
Grid technologies: link data, computers, devices and other resources of teams (from different institutions, states, countries, continents) into a single virtual laboratory
Needed: protocols, services, software kits for flexible and controlled resource sharing on a large scale
Internet Protocol (TCP-IP) Grid Protocol ?
Grid Forum is working to create a formal standard: main tool is
Globus Toolkit: open-architecture and open-source infrastructure for Grid applications such as
security, resource management, data access and sharing
Mostly driven by physics and CS groups (in Europe the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, cost > 2 billion euro)
Global Grid Forum www.gridforum.org
Globus Project www.globus.org
Grid Physics Network project www.griphyn.org
European Data Grid eu-datagrid.web.cern.ch
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