IBM Global Services
Executive Tek Report
November 13, 2001
Grid computing: Distributed advantage
Executive Summary -- The next generation of grid computing is being built today, and includes support for shared computing power, content management, applications and storage. Though initial applications are academic, the potential for business has already been recognized. It is widely believed that grid computing is inevitable, but the evolution toward this new model will depend on economics, where the advantage will be found and who will lead the way.
You're concentrating on the outside property of your home design simulation (HDS). Sug-gestions have appeared all over the virtual landscape, with specifics visible on your computer screen as you roll your cursor over the image. You are particularly interested in the idea of planting an especially nice type of lily, called hosta, next to the porch, a suggestion auto-matically created from a choice made by an HDS community member whose property has a similar topography. A visual shows the hosta to be more attractive than the ivy you have in place, so you browse through different seasons and check on erosion prevention. Because you had previously provided digital photos of your disastrous attempts to channel the flow of water in your creek to HDS to update the simulation's hydrology code, a window opens from an HDS community member in Brazil. His property has a creek and soil similar to yours. As he asks about the steps you took to work with the water, his Portuguese and your English are instantly translated for the chat. You share some documents and program modules that you used. He's a charming fellow, and you add him to your friends list.
How this happens Grid computing has been proclaimed as the successor to the Web. It is a layer of software and services that "sits on top of" operating systems and links different systems together, allowing them to share resources. By adding the ability to extensively share computing power, applications and storage to the Web's current ability to share text and multimedia files, problems that require a lot of computing resources can be resolved, devices can work past their own limits and collaboration can become more intense. Let's investigate each of these more closely.
Powerful problem solving -- Science is driving the creation of grids because it already has problems that push the limits of supercomputers, such as analyzing supercollider data, sim-ulating weather and creating a virtual observatory. Three major grid projects (TerraGrid in the U.S., the National Grid in the U.K. and a Dutch grid interconnected through SURFnet) were recently announced despite existing technical challenges. Engineering and biotech firms are likely to follow because of the complexity of the problems they face.
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Enabling devices -- The Internet extended the range of things that personal computers can do, taking advantage of its communications functions to put servers to work storing backup files, serving personal Web pages and blocking spam (unsolicited, usually commercial, e-mail sent to a large number of Internet addresses). Still, your personal computer, personal digital assistant (PDA) or other connected device does not have transparent access to all types of programs on all kinds of platforms. The applications it accesses are not necessarily inte-grated. Grid computing holds the promise of bringing this sort of power and capability to your Internet-enabled devices. In a wireless world, this could enable even simple devices -- such as pagers -- to access the power of computers across the network in a meaningful way.
Intense collaboration -- Today, most online collaboration assists in sharing documents and having discussions. This will change with grid computing, which will facilitate joint use of ap-plications. This is most important for people involved in creative endeavors, but, by detecting patterns in use of financial, home improvement, event planning and other programs, even individuals involved in more mundane tasks will benefit from the options identified, and choices made, by people with similar needs. According to Michael Schrage's book, Serious Play, "To become truly engaged in a prototype is to create a new relationship with the self and with others." Many sorts of simulation, including prototyping, can be made possible by grid computing, which could encourage new relationships and new communities.
In addition to new capabilities, there is a potential cost savings. Using spare cycles (idle time on your computer), paralleling attacks on problems, accessing via simpler devices and using only the application functions you need should make IT more economical and affordable in the future.
The Web has provided a good test bed for grid computing, both through its successes and its shortcomings. In some ways, peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is a small step in the direction of grid computing. P2P works across different platforms and enables sharing of applications and files, but it does not provide the level of security features, authentication and virtual ma-chine architecture that grid computing does. An application like the SETI@home project -- an acronym for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence -- may put processors around the globe to work, but it does not have the reliability that true grid computing demands. Data that is lost stays lost. Grid computing has learned from the mistakes of the Web (such as weaknesses in security) and P2P, but there are still many challenges ahead. For grid computing to pros-per, it will need to solve problems of standards, property rights, access and authorization and modularization and dispatching. Let's explore each of these aspects in depth.
Standards -- Think of grid computing as the ultimate integration task. While there are leading technologies, such as Sun Microsystem's Java and Extensible Markup Language (XML), there are no clear standards for elements such as security and quality of service. There are no clear lines drawn between where open source should end and proprietary code should begin. This is complicated by discussions about functionally open software and by com-petitors looking for control points in the new model.
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Property rights -- Most software used today is proprietary, and a significant amount of code being written for grid computing is owned by specific businesses. Beyond fair and legal return for the property, proprietary software may stunt the growth and development of grid computing or even determine its future direction.
Access and authorization -- Are all resources available to everyone? Most people would not mind if others used spare cycles on their systems in exchange for similar consideration, but content and personal intellectual property (such as term papers and proprietary bidding software) might be more problematic. In addition, security and property rights must be protected.
Dispatching and modularization -- How are resources shared? What is the priority? Where are assignments dispatched? How does one deal with latency? These are all nontrivial concerns, and the answers are not clear. A more difficult problem is modularizing code to distribute processing. Getting complex work done -- work that is less intrinsically parallel than today's distributed tasks and more highly dependent on successful and ordered processing -- will push the limits of object-oriented programming.
The path to the future for grid computing will vary depending upon how these problems are solved. Certainly, the work of standards bodies and the funding of massive, academic grids will have a major influence. Cooperation among public grids is already evident. The degree of openness and flexibility of the ultimate grid (or whether it becomes a collection of incom-patible grids) will probably depend largely on which industry views prevail. Despite all the industry experience in P2P -- and the investments in corporate applications like Microsoft® NetMeeting® and Groove -- Napster, arguably, has had the most influence on P2P marketplace development. What this means to you Currently, grid computers are primarily being built for academia, although significant work has been done by Boeing and other companies that have large-scale information challenges. While the ultimate expression of grid computing with worldwide, transparent access may not be realized until well into the future, significant commercial uses could be near term, possibly within a year or two for engineering firms. However, grid computing's progress may be ham-pered because there are more social barriers than technical barriers for widespread use. Issues of prioritization of access can top the list. The unexplored relationships among society, individuals and grid computing represent a threat as well as an opportunity. As they learn more about the capabilities created by grid computing, business should continuously investigate what these might mean to individuals and communities.
In addition, there are no popular uses of grid computing at present. It seems likely that grid computing will either be seen as the "Web continued" or as a specific application, just as Napster is synonymous with P2P for many people.
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There is a lot of uncertainty about how grid computing will evolve. "Tops down" development, such as the national grids, will continue, but it is also possible that P2P will mature into grid computing. This may lead to multiple visions or one vision may overwhelm the others. The popular space is largely empty, indicating vast opportunity.
Two industries: Retail and government For the retail industry, the opportunities for engaging with customers would expand beyond the current limits of business systems. For instance, a major bookstore has a well executed "online university." It provides courses for free, builds goodwill, gathers information about customer interests and sells the books and software that support the curricula. Most of the courses are taught through lecture, but if resources were more freely available, learning by doing (labs, for example) would be possible. Not only would this make the learning more effective, it would prepare customers to buy more books covering more advanced topics. Government is already deeply involved in the research end of grid computing, and there's great potential for it to become an agent of social change. For instance, concern over the so-called "digital divide" (the income-based disparity between information/computer "haves" and "have-nots") could be narrowed by using and sharing idle IT resources. In addition, grid computing could provide the means to make translation, natural language understanding, ease-of-use and other technologies available that could help include more people in com-munity affairs, who currently cannot participate because of language differences or a lack of IT skills.
Tek to watch Java Open source XML P2P Security Encryption Pervasive computing
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References Baker, Mark and Smith, Garry. IEEE Distributed Systems Online. Grid News. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://computer.org/dsonline/gc/ Benner, Jeffrey. (August, 2001). Wired News. A Grid of Supercomputers. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,45977,00.html Cooper, Charles. (August, 2001.) IBM's big thinker. Cnet news.com. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1014-201-6947778-0.html?tag=bt_bh Neves, Dr. Kenneth W. (November, 1999). Industrial "Power Grid" Computing: The Next High Performance Challenge. Boeing. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: ttp://www.atip.or.jp/ts/neves/
Terraspring Launches Data Center-Scale Computing Architecture (June, 2001.) Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://www.terraspring.com/HTML/News/newsPrCorpAnnounce.shtml Trimble, Paula Shaki. (November, 2000.) Plug and Play: Power Computing Grids. Federal Computer Week. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/1106/tec-grid-11-06-00.asp Various. (May, 2001). An Exploration of "Molecular Modelling for Drug Design" on World Wide Grid. School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~rajkumar/vlab/index.html Various. Computing power on tap (June, 2001). The Economist. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=662301 Various. (August, 2001). IBM Selected to Provide Key Technologies for Massive U.K. Computing and Data Grid. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://www.ibm.com/Press/prnews.nsf/jan/30E484B82256AD7585256A9C005169DE Various. (August, 2001.) Sun Grid Engine Software. Sun Microsystems. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://www.sun.com/software/gridware/quotes.html;$sessionid$Q0K4HVIAAD2A3AMTA1LU5YQ# Weiss, Todd R. (August, 2001.) IBM unveils grid computing concept for future IT. Computerworld. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 19, 2001: http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO62733,00.html
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Other sites of interest eBay http://www.ebay.com European Grid Forum http://www.egrid.org/ Globus http://www.globus.org/ Grid computing Info Centre http://www.gridcomputing.com/ Hewlett-Packard Company http://www.hp.com/ International Workshop on Grid Computing http://www.gridcomputing.org/ Napster http://napster.com/ NetMeeting http://www.microsoft.com/windows/netmeeting/ SETI@home http://www.seti-inst.edu/
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About this publication Executive Tek Report is a monthly publication intended as a heads-up on emerging technologies and business ideas. All the technological initiatives covered in Executive Tek Report have been extensively analyzed using a proprietary IBM methodology. This involves not only rating the technologies based on their functions and maturity, but also doing quantitative analysis of the social, user and business factors that are just as important to its ultimate adoption. From these data, the timing and importance of emerging technologies are determined. Barriers to adoption and hidden value are often revealed, and what is learned is viewed within the context of five technical themes that are driving change:
Knowledge Management: capturing a company's collective expertise wherever it resides -- databases on paper, in people's heads -- and distributing it to where it can produce the big payoffs Pervasive Computing: combining communications technologies and an array of computing devices (including PDAs, laptops, pagers and servers) to allow users continual access to the data, communications and information services Realtime: "a sense of ultracompressed time and foreshortened horizons, [a result of technology] compressing to zero the time it takes to get and use information, to learn, to make decisions, to initiate action, to deploy resources, to innovate" (Regis McKenna, Real Time, Harvard Business School Publishing, 1997.) Ease-of-Use: using user-centric design to make the experience with IT intuitive, less painful and possibly fun Deep Computing: using unprecedented processing power, advanced software and sophisticated algorithms to solve complex problems, and derive knowledge from vast amounts of data
This analysis is used to form the explanations, projections and discussions in each Executive Tek Report issue so that you not only find out what technologies are emerging, but how and why they'll make a difference to your business. If you would like to explore how IBM can help you take advantage of these new concepts and ideas, please contact us at [email protected]. To browse through other resources for business executives, please visit: ibm.com/services/insights
Executive Tek Report is written by Peter Andrews, an IBM emerging technology analyst, and is published as a service of IBM Corporation.
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Copyright ©1999-2001 IBM Corporation. All rights reserved. IBM and the e-business logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
Java and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries, or both.
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