Ian Foster

The end of Grid computing?

Guy Tel-Zur announces the end of grid computing, based on Google trends data for "grid computing" vs. "virtualization."

The data are fun, but I'm not convinced. Certainly the Google Trends data captures the fact that "virtualization" has replaced "grid computing" as the most popular industry buzzword. But given that industry has used "grid computing" mostly to mean "cluster computing" (e.g., Oracle 10-G, SGE), that doesn't say too much about grid per se.

Measuring adoption and impact is nevertheless an important goal. Thus we have integrated usage reporting mechanisms into our Globus software. We see continued growth in use, as captured by metrics such as service deployments. We're now trying to understand the underlying usage modalities. We believe that many are concerned with "eResearch" functions other than "federating computers"--e.g., on-demand access to computing [on HPC systems and/or EC2], data distribution, service publication and composition, etc. Do these functions count as "grid"? They do according to our article "The Anatomy of the Grid"--and if you look at the goals of projects such as D-Grid.

It would be interesting to see Google Trends data for just "grid." However, that word alone has too many different uses.

Digital Rome

I like this story (and see images and video)--June 11, 2007 -- ROME -- Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni will officiate at the first public viewing of "Rome Reborn 1.0," a 10-year project based at the University of Virginia and begun at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to use advanced technology to digitally rebuild ancient Rome. The event will take place at 2 p.m. in the Palazzo Senatorio on the Campidoglio.  An international team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists from Italy, the United States, Britain and Germany employed the same high-tech tools used for simulating contemporary cities such as laser scanners and virtual reality to build the biggest, most complete simulation of an historic city ever created. “Rome Reborn 1.0" shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time Rome was the multicultural capital of the western world and had reached the peak of its development with an estimated population of one million.

Carr on Grid

An interesting article from GridToday reporting on a talk by Nicholas Carr, included below in full.

Sun Blackbox video

A nice video (1 minute into Greg Papadopolous' talk) on Sun's "cluster in a shipping container" product, BlackBox, which I wrote about a while back.

Swift takes wing ...

[Update: see also a later post.]

We unveiled this week the first release of Swift, a system for the specification, execution, and management of applications comprising many tasks coupled by disk-resident datasets. Such applications are common when analyzing large quantities of data, performing parameter studies, and/or executing ensemble simulations. (The word "workflow" is often used for such applications, but it doesn't sound right to me) The open source Swift software combines:

• A simple scripting language, SwiftScript, for the concise, high-level specification of such computations (without regard to data layout or location), and
• An execution engine for the rapid and reliable dispatch of many tasks to many processors, whether on parallel computers, campus grids, or multi-site grids.

Swift users in the physical, biological, and social sciences; the humanities; computer science; and education have achieved multiple-order-of-magnitude savings (!) in program development and execution time, relative to approaches based on shell scripts and other ad hoc technologies.

Swift builds on work performed with National Science Foundation's Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) project on the Virtual Data System (VDS). Work on another VDS component, Pegasus, continues at USC/ISI.

The Swift team comprises Yong Zhao (imminent PhD, already interviewing), Mike Wilde, Mihael Hatigan, Tibi Stef-Praun, Ben Clifford, and Nika Nefedova. Gregor von Laszewski architected (and Mihael Hatigan built) the Karajan runtime system on which Swift is built. Globus services are used to access remote computers and to move data.

To Stand the Test of Time?

A recent SDSC press release describes a "groundbreaking workshop on digital data stewardship." The topic: the long-term preservation of vital data--"the single most prevalent driver for new discoveries in the 21st century."

The press release also points the interested reader to the workshop report, entitled "To Stand the Test of Time." However, when I tried that URL, I received "Error 404: Document Not Found." (Same thing for another URL discovered by a Web search.) A careless Web reorg at the Association for Research Libraries, or an ironic postmodern commentary on the difficulties of preservation?

I've been sent a copy of the report, and it looks interesting. Hopefully it will be re-preserved soon for the rest of you.

The world's biggest grid computer ...

Having recovered from the holidays and several proposals and reports, it is time for met to get back to blogging. Certainly lots of interesting things to write about.

Where better to start than a report of the world's biggest grid computer. Or maybe not ... I read a report from the Davos Forum that quotes Vint Cerf as saying that between 100 and 150 million of the world's 600 million computers are (unwittingly) engaged in botnets. The report notes that "a single botnet at one point used up about 15% of Yahoo's search capacity [retrieving] random text snippets to camouflage messages so that its spam e-mail could get past spam filters." Scary.

80 core processor

Says the EE Times:

Intel's researchers have produced an 80-core chip that uses less energy than a quad-core processor and has teraflop performance capabilities.

I know that (super)computing is getting weird, what with GPUs and Cell and the like. But it seems to be getting weirder faster than expected. I still don't understand: will the commodity processor of 2010-2015 be a homogeneous, multi-core, general purpose system, or a heterogeneous system with GPUs, CPUs, etc.?

Gradatim Ferociter

You're not going to see any mention of the iPhone here. Not a word.

Instead, a pointer to a video of the recent Blue Origin test flight. Their motto: Gradatim Ferociter, which apparently means "step-by-step--courageously." More details here. Some people think it is a prototype for a single stage to orbit launcher. Well, they have 30-40 years to get it right, from my perspective, assuming their is no age limit on passengers.

Blog on Virtualization and Grid

I discovered today Tim Freeman's interesting blog on virtualization and grid. Well worth monitoring, even though I was sad to find a pointer to a debunking of the "blue pill myth." If we can distinguish virtuality from reality on computers, what's next? Is The Matrix a myth also?