Grid Projects, SETI@home, DNet, Prospect of Grid computing, Limitations of Grid Computing

Grid Projects

International Grid Projects
Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute Europe (OMII) - May 2006 -> May 2008
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) - March 2004 -> March 2006
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE II (EGEE II) - April 2006 -> April 2008
DataTAG - January 2001 -> January 2003
European DataGrid (EDG) - March 2001 -> March 2004
BalticGrid - November 2005 -> April 2008

National Grid Projects
grid computing project at VECC (Calcutta, India)
China Grid Project
INFN Grid (Italian)
KnowledgeGrid Malaysia
NAREGI Project
Singapore National Grid Project
Thai National Grid Project
BELNET Grid, Belgium

SETI@home

SETI@home has more than 5 million participants.
-A large-scale search through data gathered by radio telescopes.
-Involved more than 3 million computers averaging.
- Utilized over 500,000 years of processing time in the past year
Main purpose: A program downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

DNet (distributed.net)

Highly successful in bringing individuals together to complete cryptographic challenges via a distributed environment.

Equivalent to more than 160,000 Pc’s 266Mhz computers working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year!

GRID.ORG (anti-cancer legend screening)

The United Devices Cancer Research Project will advance research to uncover new cancer drugs through the combination of chemistry, computers, and specialized software.

In the first year and a half, over 3.5 million drug candidates were screened using over a million personal computers.

Prospect of Grid computing

The Grid aims ultimately to turn the global network of computers into one vast computational resource.
Being developed by hundreds of researchers and software engineers around the world.
Still “work in process”
A user of Grid computing doesn't need to have the data and the software on the same computer, and neither must be on the user’s home (login) computer.
The user does not know or care where the computing operation is being performed; the process is invisible to the user.

Limitations of Grid Computing

Most of the existing applications that access Grid services require the user to type cumbersome commands.

Creating new clients and services requires programming in a language such as C or Java that everybody don’t know.
Our hope is to create an interface to Grid computing that accomplishes what Internet browsers (Netscape and Internet Explorer) did to open up the WWW .

Conclusion

Internet = Network of communication
Grid computing = Network of computation
Design goal, of solving bigger problems
Offers Information Technology as a Utility
provides multi user environment
Involves sharing heterogeneous resources
Grid computing provides a framework and deployment platform that enables resource sharing, accessing, aggregation, and management
possible to share resources across organizations, including different companies, even in different countries.
Grid services represent a convergence between high-performance computing and Web services