Talk:Grid computing

Is this the same as distributed computing or is it something else? -- Evercat 10:58 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

It is a specific example of a distributed system in the same way a heart bypass is a specific example of surgery. To borrow from the Perl developers - there is more than one way to do things. Grid computing is a specific example of a distributed system where there are a number of different organisations with different policies working together for a common purpose.[GG]

Then why does the article state that "grid computing is a super set of distributed computing"? Does it mean to say it's a superb subset of distributed computing? LX 15:51, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Right, since nobody chose to chime in for 20 days, I decided to be bold and change "super set" to "subset". If this is wrong, please speak up. --LX 13:17, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Do you really think that the Globus Toolkit has something to do with a swiss department store? Maybe you should remove the link from the Grid computing article.

Or the Globus bus company ... even the Globus Project developers have said that it was a rapidly chosen name and that they would change the name if the could. [GG]

Corrected Globus link issues, though it's a shame that Globus Toolkit automatically redirects to Globus Alliance, should really be a separate article, or at least covered more fully on the Globus Alliance page. Corrected external Globus link from 'The Globus (TM) project' to 'The Globus Alliance, in line with external link in Globus Alliance.

Done, Globus Toolkit now has own entry, though needs expansion.

Grid is more than sharing CPU-Cycles for big problems

The article adresses only one specific use case of grid computing: collection compute power for big problems. Please see e.g. the OGSA-Use-cases, and you will see that this is only one of many, many use cases. You will find the document GFD.29, 'Open Grid Services Architecture Use Cases' on https://forge.gridforum.org/ . Beside the OGSA Use-cases, there are many more use cases around which are even much more general, but they rise the question what a grid is.

I absolutely agree: idly cycle harvesting covers only a small part of grid use cases! Condor was originally created for that, in a single administrative domain, and was later 'gridified', and XXX@home like projects also aim at cpy cycle harvesting. However, globus as the main grid middleware, and basically NO work in GGF is aiming at that. The main focus really is the spanning of administrative domains for distributed problems. Everything else just derives from that. For example, basically all data related problems in GGF arise from the fact that name spaces, meta data, and data belong to different admin domains, in terms of schema, ownership, security, etc. Andre

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treated as a virtual cluster embedded in a distributed telecommunications infrastructure.

That surely is a candidate for language that makes science and technology articles harder to understand than they need be! call a bilateral trenching tool a spade! -- Tarquin 08:47, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree. This article disappears up its own I/O port sometimes and needs clarity. I also agree that the "CPU-cycles sharing" argument is overstated in the modern context. Dizzley (Peter H) 11:07, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

rubbish - for anything outside the limited confines of the user desktop, cpu cycle sharing / access is a major issue for computational science, HPC, financial services ... ad infinitum. And the sentence does make sense. [GG]

Yes it makes sense.... but I often find myself telling non-geeks about grid computing in the hope they'll try something like SETI@home or a similar project. What should I direct them to for a simple introduction? Certainly not this article as it stands! The opening few paragraphs need to be non-technical. Something that my grandmother could feasibly grasp :) -- Tarquin 15:39, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What was the first grid?

SETI@home was one of the first grids, however, it was not general purpose. That is, the SETI software was "hard-wired" to do one thing only -- perform pattern recognition on radio telescope data. One of the first general purpose grids and the first commercial grid was created by Parabon Computation. --Wikiant 21:44, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Globus predates Parabon, and there is a question of whether or not a proprietary platform can meet the criteria of being a grid. It's kind of like installing a custom networking stack and calling it the internet just because it is semantically similar. Parabon would be better classified as a distributed computing platform than a grid one. --Rw2 21:08, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

SETI@home is cited in a couple places on this page as being the first, but I don't believe that is accurate. About SETI@home and SETI@home#Figures says that it was launched May 1999.

There were other non-profit, scientific public distributed computing efforts prior to then, such as distributed.net, which dates back to April 1997 (see top paragraph).

Even if distributed.net is not the first—it's quite reasonable that other efforts existed, even if they were not non-profit organizations—it seems reasonable to say that SETI@home was not the first. --Bovineone 01:37, 14 June 2005.

SETI@home was the first commonly-known one, at least. -- Tarquin 11:52, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think SETI@home was the first commonly known project of this type, which i tend to call public computing or public resource computing. According to a lot of definitions given though, this isn't a grid. This is a complex one, as in essence there is no agreed upon definition of grid,a subject i have and am writing about at the moment. Perhaps most interestingly, i spoke with David Anderson (who launched SETI@home) last year, and he was against the use of the term grid for his work, and also for lost of other projects that many people do call grids, saying its not new technology, and doesn't need a new term. -- Ora 8th august

In the case of distributed.net, it had generated a significant amount of headlines on many large news sources throughout 1997 (the year it started and finished its first project, RC5-56), which was prior to SETI@home's reported 1999 start date. You can see links to many of these articles, which included 1997 news articles from CNN, Wired, CNET News.com, MSNBC, ZDNet, and others. I'm not sure how else one can quantify "common knowledge", but those are pretty significantly viewed news distributors. Although not archived online, there were many published print articles surrounding the distributed.net project completion. However, I do agree with you in that the use of the term "grid" has become too widespread and ambiguous in some cases. --Bovineone 01:28, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Suggestions for additional info

• A couple of other things that could be mentiond in this article is:
  • The type of problems best addressed by this computing paradigm (paradigm = 20 cents??:)) - that being highly parallelizable as opposed to serial computations.
  • How result integrity is preserved (i.e. tampering is prevented)
  • The economics involved, and also individual CPU owners' rights to results.

--Cheese Sandwich 20:59, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Why would the CPU owner have a right to a result? It's no different than saying that a calculator should have a right to the result of a problem entered. The value lies not in the solution (which exists whether one finds it or not), but in the asking of the appropriate question.

• The reason I mention it is at one point I did folding@home for a short while, and during signup they made it clear that the CPU owner relinquishes any rights to any discovery made as a result of any calculations done on that CPU (or something along those lines). --Cheese Sandwich 01:30, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

One of the interesting bits about the Grid is that resources are locally controlled and policy is dictated by that local entity. As we move toward the next generation of protocols (and here I'm specifically thinking of WS-Agreement as a basis for interaction negotiation) a resource may indeed only permit others to use it that agree to share results. If the requester doesn't like that model, then he can continue to look for another resource. --Rw2 20:51, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Reliability?

How reliable is grid computing? What if one of the computers had faulty hardware (memory, CPU etc), would that cause problems?

• Faulty hardware would result in results not being returned. Depending on the specific grid, the work would probably be re-sent to another machine. So, you'd get the same effect as if the machine had accepted work, been shut down, and so never returned a result. Some grids periodically "ping" their nodes to verify that they (1) still exist, and (2) are working on the last problem sent them. These grids would quickly detect and compensate for a faulty machine.

• It actually pretty common that faulty computers (bad RAM or overheating processors) can continue to operate with very few observable operational flaws. Usually this results in subtle computational errors due to bits getting randomly flipped by the hardware. (Of course sometimes a critical bit that affects a memory pointer gets flipped, which will cause the process to segfault/coredump/access-violate or sometimes the entire OS to panic/bluescreen.) For more reliable results, you can run the same workunit on more than one computer and compare the numerical outcomes. If the two results do not match within tolerances, then one of the computers may have been faulty and you need to run the result again until you're confident. -- Bovineone 03:02, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Globus claims

Globus is certainly widely used, but i'm not sure you can claim its the de-facto middleware solution. Rather, its is a _toolkit_ of which many components are used widely. Overall, given the nature of middleware, describing them as single applications as it were, is misleading. Each is made of many components which can be seperately installed. I removed the claim the Globus was the 'core middleware' for European Grids.

Too bad that was removed. Globus is more than just a toolkit. It is also a suite of services that, without any additional programming, provide a complete grid solution for many classes of deployment. --Rw2 20:51, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

More Globus information about it would probably be best put in its own article at Globus Toolkit. That article could use some significant additions (and maybe splitting into a separate article), since it currently only discusses the Globus Alliance organization. -- Bovineone 06:27, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

That would be fine, except that Globus Toolkit forwards to Globus Alliance and I don't know how to change that.  :-( --Rw2 23:41, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Done, now Globus toolkit is its own article. ora 08:25, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Grid Hardware

I've seen grids running on everything from occassionally-connected laptop 'clusters', through to racks of servers. And, I heard rumours of grid-style applications being developed on configurable CPUs (FPGAs and GPUs, ?) with tremendous performance gains possible. Does anyone know more about the later? --Richard@lbrc.org 09:50, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Spelling

So nurg just did a good copyedit, but he changed all instances of Grid to grid. Personally i use a capitalised version (i work on a Grid project) as i find it distinguished it from a geometric grid. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions. In the Grid field i find both used depending on the organisation, and don't consider grid inherently more accurate than Grid. ora 12:47, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Is it a proper noun? It doesn't appear so to me. Nurg 03:13, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Unaware of this note in discussion I went in and changed all references to Grid a few days ago. While working "Grid Computing: The Savvy Manager's Guide" we leaned on a linguist to help us verify the correct spelling. --Rw2 13:15, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Reorganisation

So i think this article is due a bit of an overhaul. It has good information but in a pretty strange order as it has grown fairly organically, and 'state of the art 2005' is a bit out of date now we are well into 2006. I'd be happy to have a go but i wanted to see if there were any objections first as i think the article will look pretty difefrent afterwards. I will come up with a revised order first and post it here before i go ahead though. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ora (talk • contribs)

At minimum, I think the current sections "The Global Grid Forum", "The Globus Alliance", and "Commercial grid computing offerings" could be put together as subsections in a new section entitled "Organizations and corporate supporters" or something. Additionally, the entire "Conceptual framework" section needs to be moved to be earlier in the article (before the organizations). Maybe something like the below... (free free to edit it) -- Bovineone 00:07, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

• Origins
• Common features
• Definitions of grid computing
• Conceptual framework
  • Virtual organization
  • Resource utilization
• State-of-the-art, 2006
• Organizations and corporate supporters
  • The Global Grid Forum
  • The Globus Alliance
  • Commercial grid computing offerings
• See also
• References
• External links

Oh, please do a complete rewrite. The current state is much of a mess. Smoe

Agree. Go for it. I can't understand how this got to be designated a "good article". The opening sentence is awful. Just mind the capitalisation ;-) see my earlier comment. Nurg 03:20, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

OK, so I'll start on a revision on a subpage at Talk:Grid computing/Draft Revision. It will take me a while, and I'll post again here when I have reached a reasonable point. Others please do contribute but discuss it here as well. ora 08:10, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

external links

That's a lot of external links... Surely some of them should be removed. See WP:EL for the policy. I would try to remove some, but I'm not too familiar with Grid computing. Gflores ^Talk 05:12, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Diffrence between grids and clusters

Though this article page says clusters should not be confused with grids. Sun Grid documentation no. 817-6117 does not seem to agree.

As per Sun, Grid is a collection of computers, that are capable of performing a task in a collaboration, appearing to the user as a single entity. There are three classes of grids: Cluster grid, Campus grid, Global grid. Though topologically they are same, the geographical proximity between the members of the grid differentiate their classes. In the Cluster grid the member computers are located in the same rack (or a room) and are connected by a high speed LAN, usually a gigabit LAN. The Campus grid's computers are scattered within a building. And, Global grid, as the name suggests, is distributed across the planet, connected by Internet.

Ashish Banerjee

The canonical definition is from Foster and SGE/N1 don't match it. --Rw2 13:13, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

SETI@home

Sorry about the use of the text from the page; didn't realize that went against policy. I've re-added the text I wrote (and left out the text from the page as well as the banner, of course.) FlyByPC 19:37, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Should we add info on this 'best discovery yet? [1]/[2]? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 20:23, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Just did, see SHGb02 14a and expand. Whether or not this is little green men talking to us, or a computer bug, it is likely to be newsworthy. It will probably be at least as significant as the Wow! signal historically, even if it doesn't pan out. pstudier 21:51, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

SETI@home Wikipedia Team

If you want to join a team for SETI@home, have a look at the Wikipedia team! --80.229.152.246 16:04, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wow, what about this team too? Greudin (discuss.) 09:57, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Or if your interested in the World Community Grid, join this team Students for a Cure Caleb rosenberg 18:34, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

History

Should there be a history section? Who was involved in setting it up? (Is David Anderson notable?) When was it conceived? How long did it take to get set up?

David P. Anderson has been created now. Anyone for a history section? crandles 16:12, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Definitely. Cheers -- Svest 17:57, August 27, 2005 (UTC) ^{Wiki me up ™}

What makes SETI@home's SETI different?

The current text indicates that SETI@home is unique in that it uses coherent integration, but all modern microwave and some optical SETI searches, use both coherent and non-coherent integration.

Coherent here really just means the use of discrete Fourier transforms, rather than simply averaging the power. The link on coherent integration is also misleading as the connection between optical coherence and coherent integration is rather tenuous, although optical coherence is a prerequisite for signals to be detected by coherent integration.

In SETI@home, the gaussian search is effectively non-coherent integration and the pulse search certainly uses non-coherent integration.

What's really unique is the number of chirp rates tried, and, in later versions, the search for repeating pulses.

David Woolley 13:11, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Threats to the project

It is clear that the main threats to the project are funding (though there was a debate about this issue in 2002 [3]) and the appearence of other alternative projects (BOINC - though I consider it as a solution instead of a threat). However, I don't agree about the following:

• Participants are not prepared for the future: In 2003, the Planetary Society said that "SETI@home is moving forward with plans for a more sensitive and comprehensive sky survey. Within the next two years the SETI@home team hopes to phase out the aging receiver at the base of the line feed...Working together, ALFA researchers hope to be granted as many as 10,000 observing hours on the radio telescope, spread over 5 years...Once the observations get under way, perhaps early in 2005, the SETI@homne sky survey will become more sensitive and comprehensive than ever before. It will be a new chapter in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence." [4]. On the other hand, Rapid Prototype Array solving a variety of scientific and technical challenges as they move toward the final design and construction of the full One Hectare Telescope (1hT).

Part of what I deleted was the statement that nothing had been found in six years, with the implication that it should have been. In fact, even before the project started, people were warning that it might have a negative impact on SETI because of unreasonable expectations. So the first part of this is the idea that people thought that the project would find an ETI within a short amount of time and therefore consider it to have failed because it hasn't. The other half of this is that maybe most participants aren't doing it for the science at all, so will drop out when fashions change.

--David Woolley 20:12, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

• More restrictive computer use policies in businesses: What is the percentage of the project being executed on machines belonging to businesses Vs personal and academic ones? Logically, it should be a tiny one. Even if it was true, computers are and will have more processing powers plus the fact that phone lines are gradually changing to cable and fibre-optic. As Professor Werthimer puts it "20 years ago we listened to 100 channels - now we listen to 100 million." [5]. -- Cheers Svest 15:36, 15 October 2005 (UTC)  Wiki me up™

Originally most of the work was probably been done on business machines. A lot of the early SETI farms were servers under test. It ought to be possible to find out from the dynamic statistics on the SETI site, if they are still there. Many of the systems doing a lot of work were under the control of IT deparment people, so more immune from policies. It's certainly true more home computers are always on, but it is also true that home users are actually being lost because BOINC is more difficult to use with an intermittent connection.

--David Woolley 20:12, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Good arguments. I agree. --Cheers Svest 20:42, 15 October 2005 (UTC)  Wiki me up™

The entire "threats to the project" section sounds slightly short of NPOV, as it subtly takes the view of a project member. "What threatens us?" In particular, calling other grid computing projects a threat is at least questionable terminology. --Mr. Billion 06:53, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

L33t hax0r alienz are set to take over the Earth via SETI!

Be afraid, be very afraid!

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-112005.html#00000724 http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/SETI/SETI_Hacker.htm — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.70.48.242 (talk • contribs)

For a counter argument see http://www.setileague.org/articles/hacker.pdf

Also note that a resistor connected to the antenna input will, given long enough cover all possible input patterns (I think it will cover 90% within about an order of magnitude of the time to enumerate them systematically). --David Woolley 08:59, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Honestly that has to be one of the most farfetched things I've ever heard. —Aiden 04:42, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Propose change to Harvard referencing

I propose to change the referencing style from inline URLs, plus full citation in References, to using Harvard style references inline (with the same full citations). The advantage of this is that it is easier to see which facts come from which sources, which helps in maintaining the sources and means that it is easier for a reader to judge the reliability of statements against their perception of the reliabilty of particular sources.

Note that the article is generally under sourced at the moment (a common problem on Wikipedia).

Up to yesterday, I believe that I was the only person to have contributed inline references, so I could have made the change unilaterally. A couple of references have now been added inline in the direct URL style, but have not yet been properly cited in the References section. See, for example, WP:V and WP:CITE for why full citations are desirable, although it is also worth noting that Berkeley has a real problem with link rot and renaming URLs. --David Woolley 09:11, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

s-23 wiki

On February 11, JarlaxleArtemis added a section about "s-23 wiki",

a MediaWiki-based wiki created by the Seti23 cabal. It is described as a "non-hierarchical geek contents dis-organization by uncensored, decentralized, transglobal multi-user hypertext editing without restrictions." It is both an English- and German-language wiki.

The Seti23 is a team dedicated to Karl Koch and is participating in the SETI@home project.

I removed the section. There are thousands of SETI@home teams; this team does not appear to be any more notable than any other team. Note that s-23 wiki used to have its own article, but it was deleted. dbenbenn | talk 10:32, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

SETI@home "not a grid project"

The article states that "Grid purists point out that Seti@home is really a distributed computing application as it does not make use of almost any Grid concepts." (Note that SETI is capitalised in the SETI@home article, whereas this article is inconsistent in its usage.)

About the only attempts to distinguish the concepts of grid computing and distributed computing that I have found in this article or in distributed computing are two separate and inconspicuous sentences in this one. Firstly: "Grid computing's focus on the ability to support computation across administrative domains sets it apart from ... traditional distributed computing." Secondly: "One characteristic that currently distinguishes grid computing from distributed computing is the abstraction of a 'distributed resource' into a grid resource." (Currently? Has this changed? Is it expected to?) It is not immediately apparent to me, even after reading this article and the SETI@home article how the project fails to meet these criteria, as these unnamed "purists" claim.

As a general comment, there appears to be a great deal of confusion with respect to the relationship between grid and distributed computing (and, to a lesser extent, clustered computing). It would appear that a definition by delimitation and relation is called for in the introductory definitions in this article and in distributed computing.

LX 16:07, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Quite Wrong About SETI@home

Having said that "SETI@home is not a grid project", the article then goes on to say, In a Grid, only the code required for retrieving work and returning results persists on the nodes. Code required to perform the distributed work is sent to the nodes separately. In this way, the nodes of a Grid can be easily reprogrammed.

This is an absolutely perfect description of (my understanding of) the BOINC framework, upon which SETI@home is built!

Consequently, the preceding assertion, "SETI@home's screensaver contains both code to process radio telescope data and code to handle retrieving work and returning results. The two bodies of code are intertwined into a single program.", is just plain wrong.

Indeed, the arrant nonsense of this assertion can clearly be seen in the fact that SETI@home can be run on Linux/UNIX without any graphics capability at all (I run the clients like this myself). Not alone is the infrastructure/management/network client (BOINC) separate from the project client (SETI@home, Predictor@home, climateprediction.net, ...), but the screensaver, if any, is a separate component again.

-- EmmetCaulfield 07:54, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Kind of. I work in Grids, and I see endless disgreement about what Grids are. I have also met the guy who wrote seti@home, and according to him it is not a grid (either the 'classic' or BOINC versions. A friend of mine is studying the emergence of Grid technology froma social/community standpoint, and sugegsts that the definition is currently as fluid as the technology, making blanket statements for any single project as beig a Grid or not fairly hard to justify. ora 14:14, 28 April 2006 (UTC) (PS- still trying to carve out time from work to rewrite this article)

I'm not arguing about what grids are or whether SETI@home meets a particular definition: I don't know enough about either to do that. What I am saying is that even a superficial understanding of BOINC (at the level of installing optimized clients, and writing app_info files, say) makes it obvious that the article's assertion that SETI@home is monolithic is flat-out wrong. Secondly, the definition of a grid which the article proffers seems to me to admit BOINC (maybe even to the extent of BOINC being an exemplar of the definition used), but the article proceeds to explicitly exclude SETI@home, which can't be right -- EmmetCaulfield 19:20, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Spam

As far as I can see the following added nothing to the article and, I think, constituted spam. I have removed it to here as it may be possible to turn this list into a sensible paragraph. Andreww 17:27, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Key vendors in Grid computing, in alphabetical order:

• Acxiom [6]
• DataSynapse [7]
• GreenTeaSoft
• Gridalogy
• GridSystems
• GridwiseTech
• Hewlett Packard — HP Grid Computing
• IBM — IBM Grid Computing website
• Oracle Corporation — Oracle Grid
• Parabon Computation
• Sun Microsystems — Sun Grid Engine, Sun Grid
• United Devices — Grid MP, grid.org
• Univa Corporation (Globus)

Vendors of related technology (e.g. schedulers and cluster file systems):

• Cluster Resources, Inc. — Moab Grid Suite
• Cluster File Systems, Inc. — Lustre (file system)
• Digipede [8]
• Cassatt(Collage)
• Platform Computing — LSF
• Gigaspaces Enterprise Application Grid
• Mobile Agent Technologies - AgentOS
• BigBlueRiver

mass text removal

While I support removing the commercial links, or maybe moving them to a sub-page, the last revision that wiped out the seti@hoem section, two of the definitions, and the LCG>EGEE section was too much. Maybe consider writing them but don't just blank them without explanation. SETI@home may or may not be a grid by some definitions but it is worth a mention, the definitions were useful on some level (i might have cut down Buyya for self promotion but not removed his work), and the removal of discussion of two major working production grids was silly. If you dislike the delivery, try rewriting the sections, don't just remove info without explanation. ora 13:02, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Second this response. The basic idea of cleaning up and spam reduction is sound. I'd even agree that each of the targeted sections could use some work. But, unlike the eyeOS sections previously redacted, the targeted sections do also contain some legit commentary worth saving with modification. --Rw2 16:01, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Cheers. Also I have started on a reorganization of this article on a subpage, after some expressed support and no disagreement. See section "Reorganization" above. I _hope_ this will address some of the issues in the text as is. The article has lots of good info but the presentation is dodgy. ora 17:05, 23 May 2006 (UTC)