Are you on the grid?

[ksmith]

I'm just getting used to high-speed wireless. Now this.

Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.

The grid has already been used to screen potential drug molecules and design new anti-malarials. Once it becomes available to non-business users, the effects could be tremendous.

Comments

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Apologies if any of this is stuff you already know; I really have /no/ idea how into this stuff you are :)

This is sort of an unusual article. Traditionally, 'grid computing' has mostly been about processing and computation as a...sort of commodity. It's the idea that when you have big number-crunching to do (like the drug simulations you mentioned), you don't have to buy a supercomputer...instead, your calculations are spread across a few thousand existing computers (for whose time you might pay a fee, or alternately it might all be part of the service for which you're paying your ISP) and returned to you. Alternately, you might do 'grid computing' in-house - say, using all of the desktop computers in your office building. It's a fuzzy sort of term, and it overlaps with 'distributed computing' and things like SETI@home.

This article focus more on the networking aspects, which is a different perspective. High-speed networking is required for all of that other stuff, because if you're using a thousand different computers to share the load, they need to be able to talk to each other and share data without the transmission delay slowing the whole process to the point where it's not worth the effort. It's just sort of uncommon to see an article about grid computing that /focuses/ on the network aspect, rather than just seeing that as infrastructure.

(Sorry about the double-post - didn't notice I wasn't logged in!)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I was able to delete the extra comment. It happens.

I wonder where the closest hubs are in Illinois. I am guessing that the big universities must have one or more. And Argonne.

Oh, the possibilities. A holodeck in every home.

We really have no idea what's coming. All we can do is guess.

[pxcampbell.livejournal.com]

LOL! Those scientists get all the best toys first. First, they get the new fangled invention called the Internet, now they get the Grid.

I should have studied something different in college.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I should have studied something different in college.

I don't have a programmers brain. Did courses in Basic and Fortran in university. Nothing stuck. No light bulbs were lit.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Don't have a physicist's brain, either. OMG, do I not have a physicist's brain.