Worldwide Virtual Computer
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Worldwide Virtual Computer
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Computing power from millions of Internet-connected computers at your fingertips
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Elsewhere on the Web
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• The Net As One Giant Brain
• Intel Forms Peer-To-Peer Working Group
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The explosive growth of the World Wide Web has brought us the ability to access information from all over the world in a matter of seconds. We often take that for granted, but remember how long and hard you had to search for information in the pre-Internet era. As the Web becomes faster and more powerful, if offers new opportunities, some of which are not related only to information access. You are probably familiar with services similar to the famous SETI@Home project - a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence(SETI). The main part of the system works as a screen saver that can go and get a chunk of data over the Internet, analyze that data, and then report the results back to central servers. Then came Napster, popular music-sharing system and Gnutella, similar but decentralized distributed file exchange system. Naturally, the next step will be to combine the processing power of thousands of networked personal computers to create a worldwide virtual supercomputer.
Several research labs and commercial ventures are working on a concept of "computing grid", developing services and software that can manage complex physical systems of disparate, geographically separated resources. Considering the unforeseen demands placed on hardware and software resources, surprisingly high number of such systems went public recently or are preparing to do so in a near future. They are laying foundation for a new class of applications that need vast computing power: undoubtedly, quite a few AI-related projects will benefit greatly from this concept. Tomorrow's computing grids will offer a reliable source of computing power, similar to the modern electrical power grid. Among the metacomputing platforms leading this peer-to-peer computing boom are:
The Metasystems thrust, with the primary goal of creating an operational metasystem - a collection of disparate resources, usually geographically separated, that can be used as a single resource. This thrust is integrating software being developed in several related projects, including:
- AppLeS project is providing mechanisms and paradigms that perform scheduling and decision making on behalf of the user in a distributed heterogeneous system. Part of the AppLeS project focuses on developing Application-Level Scheduling agents to provide a mechanism for scheduling individual applications at machine speeds. Another effort is concentrated on the development of AppLeS templates, stand-alone software projects that perform scheduling and deployment tasks for classes of structurally similar applications.
- Legion is an object-based metasystems software project at the University of Virginia, designed for a system of millions of hosts and trillions of objects tied together with high-speed links. It sits on top of the user's operating system, acting as liaison between its own hosts and whatever other resources are required. Users can run applications written in multiple languages, since Legion supports interoperability between objects written in multiple languages.
- The Globus Project is developing the fundamental technology that is needed to build computational grids and applications that use grid services. It was recently used in solving the "nug30" Quadratic Assignment Problem.
- The Network Weather Service is a distributed system that periodically monitors and dynamically forecasts the performance various network and computational resources can deliver over a given time interval. The service operates a distributed set of performance sensors from which it gathers readings of the instantaneous conditions.
The Distance and Distributed Computing and Communication (DisCom2) program is intended to deliver key computing and communications technologies to efficiently integrate distributed resources with high-end computing resources at a distance.
The European Grid Forum, EGrid, aims at fostering the cooperative use of distributed computing resources that are accessible via wide area networks. It is an open forum, the community includes individuals from European research institutes, universities and companies working in the field of wide area computing and computational grids.
The goals of MetaNEOS are to design metacomputing environments suitable for solving large optimization problems and develop tools that can be used to solve computing problems of unprecedented size and complexity. The metacomputing platforms that used in metaNEOS are inexpensive, focusing on utilization of idle time on collections of workstations, which is essentially free.
MILAN (Metacomputing in Large Asynchronous Networks) is a research project aiming to build a software environment emulating a collection of virtual machines on a non-dedicated, distributed platform. It is a joint effort between New York University and Arizona State University.
NAS Systems Division is designing an "Information Power Grid" - a twenty-year project that aims to seamlessly integrate computing systems, data storage, specialized networks, and sophisticated analysis software. Its scheduling software will dynamically and intelligently allocate resources among dispersed computing centers as they are needed. An excellent resource offering links to numerous related resources is known as Information Power Grid Hotlist.
The National Computational Science Alliance is working to prototype a seamless, integrated computational and collaborative environment called the National Technology Grid, comprised of a computational grid and an access grid.
NetSolve is a client-server system that enables users to solve complex scientific problems remotely. The system searches for computational resources on a network, chooses the best one available, process and returns the answers to the user.
NLANR's excellent Beginner's Guide to Network-Distributed Resource Usage offers you an introduction to using high-speed networks for computational research. Each chapter is a self-contained web page that can be easily printed and then compiled for a deskside volume.
As for the commercial tools and services, DataSynapse is targeting financial services companies that need vast computing power. Participants will start by installing Java-based software on their computers. Jobs are given out from a central server, processed by the client computers and sent back under the control of the client software. Only broadband connections can be used in this network to ensure the acceptable performance. Users who participate in this project will receive Flooz, online gift credits that can be used to buy merchandise from Flooz.com's merchant partners.
Entropia 2000 is free software that activates your PC's idle resources producing a 24x7 sustained rate of 1 Teraflop/sec. It also uses an optional screen saver that reflects your PC's ongoing computing work. There are several active projects that can be reviewed at their Worldwide Projects list.