Grid Computing To Help Green Technology

Scientist at Harvard University and IBM are hoping to make use of the power of a million idle computers to develop a new, cheaper form of solar power that could revolutionize the green energy world.

Researchers have launched the project using IBM's World Community Grid, which taps into volunteers' computers across the globe to run calculations. Without using the grid,the project that could take 22 years compared to just two years using the grid. The World Community Grid, a relatively unknown IBM venture that makes use of grid computing.

Here is a full article of this news:-

IBM and Harvard Tap World Community Grid
December 8, 2008
by David Gelles

Researchers from IBM and Harvard are teaming up to produce cheaper, more efficient solar cells. It’s a noble effort, and solar could certainly use the help as it struggles to gain traction.

Yet what’s most interesting here is not the research itself, but the way in which it’s being conducted. These scientists won’t be squirrelled away in some university basement. Rather, they’ll be using the computing power from a network of idle PCs around the world to screen organic compounds for certain electronic properties.

The project is the latest by the World Community Grid, an enormously powerful but relatively unknown IBM venture that makes use of grid computing. “Grid technology harnesses unused cycle time – the computing power – of individual PCs, and groups them together to form a virtual supercomputer,” said Stanley Litow, IBM’s VP for corporate citizenship and affairs.

Sure enough, the World Community Grid is running at an average of 179 Teraflops, roughly equivalent to the 11th most powerful supercomputer on earth. (The current heavyweight, IBM’s Roadrunner, runs at more than 1 Petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second.)

Altruistic Grid members sign up and download a small application. Then, when their computers go idle, instead of a screensaver coming on, the Grid takes over and voilà! – a MacBook in Chicago becomes a node in a worldwide supercomputer.

IBM launched the Grid four years ago, and has invested $5 million worth of resources in the project. Already, it is being used to help cure cancer and fight AIDS to good effect. But IBM’s Litow is frustrated more people don’t know about the Grid, or it’s good works. “We have all of these very very serious humanitarian issues that are crying out for supercomputing power to create solutions,” he said. “The potential of the WCG is really monumental.”

Take the Help Conquer Cancer project, which aims to improve the results of protein X-ray crystallography, thereby helping researchers understand cancer initiation, progression and treatment. Since the launch of the cancer project last November, Grid members have contributed almost 19,627 years of run time, returning 24,502,692 results, or about 16% of the work.

Now, Harvard Professor Alan Aspuru-Guzik, hopes to find compounds that will make better solar cells, ultimately leading to wider adoption of clean energy sources. Aspuru-Guzik said with the help of the Grid, he expects to complete 22 years worth of computations in two years.

Grid computing has been put to use for scientific research before, most notably through the SETI@home program, in which users volunteer their idle PCs to scan radio telescope data for signs of alien life.

SETI@home has attracted more than five million users. The World Community Grid, with just over 413,000 members volunteering 1.2 million computers, has a long way to go. Litow want this to change. He remembers that when the Grid launched, one commenter remarked, “Forget about aliens, let’s cure AIDS.”

Resource :- http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2008/12/ibm-and-harvard-tap-world-community-grid/

Another source of this news is Earth2Tech.com. The title is IBM, Harvard Launch Distributed-Computing Search for Super-Efficient Solar Cells

High Performance PCs - Rising Demand

HPC - High Performance PC and there is an increasing demand for this, according to the news below. Well this will tie in with Grid computing very soon. The use of HPC saved resources and time. Users can used it for designing F1 cars to understand how viruses works.  

HPC riding high in the wake of credit crunch

Economic downturn sees firms turning to supercomputers to avoid real-life errors

The economic downturn has sparked a boom in demand for high-performance computing (HPC) among private sector firms, according to resellers working in the sector.

Julian Fielden, managing director of IBM reseller OCF, claimed the HPC market is expanding four times faster than the general server market as firms turn to supercomputers to avoid costly manufacturing errors.
“HPC is popular in Formula 1 racing, as the car designers can build a prototype on a PC instead of physically building it,” he said.

“They can put it in a virtual wind tunnel and alter the design to make it more aerodynamic ­ companies want to simulate their mistakes instead of replicating them.”

Alastair Edwards, senior analyst at research house Canalys agreed that the HPC channel is more insulated against the credit crunch than other sectors.

“HPC is a niche market and very few are skilled in this area, so there is always demand for it. It makes sense that HPC is growing in the private sector as the public sector is never really affected by economic downturns due to its funding cycles and project-led support,” he said.

OCF recently won a £250,000 contract to upgrade the University of Westminster’s previous 32-node high-performance compute cluster (HPCC) with a new 96-node HPCC. However, Fielden admitted HPC spend in the public sector was
limited by the amount of money offered by the government.

The upgrade has increased the university’s contribution to the UK grid computing facility, the National Grid Service (NGS).

Researchers use the grid to share information on a range of medical disciplines. For example, they can use the grid to understand how cancer or HIV molecules interact with each other under certain stimuli.

News Source : - http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/news/2220782/hpc-riding-wake-credit-crunch-4101977

Cloud Computing News

I came across another piece of article on cloud computing. There is indeed differences between cloud computing and grid computing. This article describe more to be done to cloud computing as that had been done with grid computing. Surprisingly, the industry is waiting and seeing how Google is going to take this cloud computing onwards. Hmm... that's interesting.

Cloud Computing Needs Rainmakers

In the early 1990s, a new computing architecture known as “grid computing” was conceived. The term itself is a metaphor that refers to making computing power as easy to access as the electrical power grid. The three originators of the grid computing concept (Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve Tueche) went on to lead the creation of the Globus Toolkit, a collection of Open Source Software (OSS) tools that can be used to build and manage computing grids. To this day the toolkit is a robust OSS project with new releases planned and many success stories behind it. A true computing grid has the following three properties:

1. There is no central administration of computing resources.
2. The grid uses open standards.
3. The grid can guarantee “quality of service” rather than “best effort”.

Cloud computing is a new term that refers to a subset of grid computing, and represents an alternative to having local servers or personal devices handling users’ applications. In general, the cloud is meant to represent the Internet, so cloud computing suggests that functionality comes from the Internet rather than any specific identifiable computing device. Also central to the idea is that management tasks are automated; if the system requires human intervention to allocate processes to computing resources then it’s not a cloud, it’s only a data center.

Perhaps the single greatest advantage of cloud computing is that it easily handles peak load situations without the need for additional hardware infrastructure that will spend most of its time underutilized. Resources can be virtualized and presented to the customer as virtual servers which the customers themselves manage. Physically, the resources might span multiple computers or even multiple data centers.

A well known implementation of cloud computing is the “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud”, which allows customers to create, lauch and terminate virtual server instances on demand. Pricing is based on The number of instance-hours where an “instance” represents the equivalent computing power of a standard configuration of physical system. Data transfer is also priced by the gigabyte. All utilization is done through a collection of Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) which provide a standard platform for developers. The Amazon ECC is a well designed robust cloud computing environment which most experienced developers can take advantage of.

I believe that cloud computing is here to stay, but also that it will have slow growth at first. The slow growth is partly due to a large installed user base of data centre servers which would be difficult to port to the cloud, and partly due to general discomfort with hosting the company’s data on someone else’s hardware. In fact, Canadian law requires that for certain types of data (such as health records), the data must be hosted on machines that are physically located within the national boundaries. The reason given by the government for this is simple: The U.S. Patriot Act. Placing physical limitations on where data can be located in many ways defeats the purpose of a computing cloud.

As usual, the big players in the industry have all been pretty much stuck for a while, so for now they are all watching to see how Google is going to push the edges again. It will be particularly interesting to see if Google tackles the toughest part of the problem: integrating the cloud with mobile devices (you thought I was going to say the online/offline issue didn’t you?) This is something they are positioning themselves to take on with Android, their (relatively) new mobile platform.

It will take a few years, but eventually cloud computing will reach critical mass and really take off in terms of popular use. In the process, it will make a lot of Internet empires, and a lot of empires bigger; the developers and companies that are able to build applications that seamlessly integrate the cloud with desktop computing and mobile devices will make the first fortunes made. The ones which bring ease of use to the end consumer are the ones that will really turn clouds into rainmakers.

source :- http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/idol/2008/06/07/cloud-computing-needs-rainmakers/

Cloud Computing - What is it?

A term I came across why searching for news and material on grid computing. So being naturally curious I just got to see what is this thing called cloud computing.

Thus this brings me to this website : http://www.sys-con.com/read/584958.htm

This website has got a good definition of Grid computing, cloud computing and much more. And I reproduce the definition here. The author of the article had done some up a good summary of the definitions taken from Wikipedia.

* Grid Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing
o Multiple independent computing clusters which act like a “grid” because they are composed of resource nodes not located within a single administrative domain. (formal)
o Offering online computation or storage as a metered commercial service, known as utility computing, computing on demand, or cloud computing.
o The creation of a “virtual supercomputer” by using spare computing resources within an organization.

* Cloud Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
o Cloud computing is a computing paradigm shift where computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual application server to a “cloud” of computers. Users of the cloud only need to be concerned with the computing service being asked for, as the underlying details of how it is achieved are hidden. This method of distributed computing is done through pooling all computer resources together and being managed by software rather than a human.
o The services being requested of a cloud are not limited to using web applications, but can also be IT management tasks such as requesting of systems, a software stack or a specific web appliance.

* Utility Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing :
o Conventional Internet hosting services have the capability to quickly arrange for the rental of individual servers, for example to provision a bank of web servers to accommodate a sudden surge in traffic to a web site.
o “Utility computing” usually envisions some form of virtualization so that the amount of storage or computing power available is considerably larger than that of a single time-sharing computer. Multiple servers are used on the “back end” to make this possible. These might be a dedicated computer cluster specifically built for the purpose of being rented out, or even an under-utilized supercomputer. The technique of running a single calculation on multiple computers is known as distributed computing.

* Distributed Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing
o A method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network. Distributed computing is a type of segmented or parallel computing, but the latter term is most commonly used to refer to processing in which different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more processors that are part of the same computer. While both types of processing require that a program be segmented—divided into sections that can run simultaneously, distributed computing also requires that the division of the program take into account the different environments on which the different sections of the program will be running. For example, two computers are likely to have different file systems and different hardware components.

Do drop by the above site for more details explanation. They have got a fantastic diagrams illustrating how each system works.

Spare CPU Power - How Real Virus Buster Uses It

You can use your spare cpu power to help to tackle deadly diseases that had plagued mankind for a long time and as well as diseases that only recently had emerged.

At the time of writing, there are a few projects using grid computing to tackle well known deadly diseases such as AIDS, cancer, malaria, smallpox, Ebola and the latest disease to hit the headlines like SARS and avian flu.

In order to take part in any of the above grid computer projects, you will need to have a reasonable fast computer, e.g. a pentium4 and equipped with Internet access. A under utilized computer will be best as it has lots of spare cpu power. You will then need to install a small program. This program can be downloaded from the project websites.

Usually once installed, they will work as a screen saver or will be running in the background without affecting your usage of the computer. Anyway most likely your will install the program to a spare CPU, so likely you are not using it as the program runs.

When the program runs, it will then request a small packet of data over the Internet from the main project central computer or server. Also most of the programs are designed to work through proxy servers like those mainly used by companies.

The program will then uses your PC spare CPU power to process the data. They do this in the background or when during the screen saver phase. Anyhow you will not realize it when it is doing its job.

The good thing about these programs is they are designed in such a way that they only run when there are spare CPU powers or where the computer resources are not used. Should you used the computer and requires the CPU power, the program will then retreat and give priority to running your task. Thus in no way your computer performance will be affected.

Once the require task is completed, such as the task of analysis, the programs will send out the results back to the central computer and request for a new set of data to be analyzed. Should you are off line when the programs finished analyzing the data, they will wait till the next time the computer is connected to the Internet before they (the programs) send and receive new data.

So this is how real virus buster grid computing uses your spare or excess cpu power.

Spare CPU Power Virus Buster

Here is a really great idea of contributing your spare CPU power and that is to let them take part in the real virus buster programs using grid computing.

Our world has many deadly diseases and there are frequent outbreaks, which are normally reported in the headlines. Is there other ways where we can help to meet this problem other than donating to health charities or research institutions?

I am glad to answer the above question with a definite YES.

And one way you can do it is by participating in various research projects, which harness the unused, processing power of idle PCs located in homes and offices using Grid Computing. The number of these PCs can numbered into millions. First let's start with the definition of grid computing.

What is GRID computing?

From Wikipedia :-

Grid Computing is a phrase in distributed computing which can have several meanings:

• Multiple independent computer clusters which act like a "grid" because they are composed of resource nodes not located within a single administrative domain. (formal)
• Offering online computation or storage as a metered commercial service, known as utility computing.
• The creation of a "virtual supercomputer" by using spare computing resources within an organization.
• The creation of a "virtual supercomputer" by using a network of geographically dispersed computers. Volunteer computing which generally focuses on scientific, mathematical, and academic problems, is the most common application of this technology.

And for real virus busting, the fourth definition is relevant. Currently there are grid-computing projects to tackle cancer, AIDS, SARS, avian flu, Ebola, smallpox, anthrax and other afflictions. Almost anyone with a computer and Internet access can take part in these projects. To take part, usually one has to download and install a small program.

The use of grid computing for finding new drugs is relatively new, but concepts of using computers to stimulate the working of drugs is well established. Scientists have been using computer simulations of drugs and it’s workings for many years.

The method of stimulation starts with the identification of possible drug targets. These are normally disease-causing microbes. Then scientists employ a process called virtual screening by using the computer to simulate the combination of millions of different drug molecules against a specific microbe. Through this it is possible to identify potential promising combinations that can kill the microbe.

Up to now researchers could only depend and use expensive supercomputers to run these complex and time-consuming simulations. However, by taking advantage of grid technology, scientists hope to harness the combined power of thousands to even millions of PCs. This results in considerable saving in time and costs.

Speaking of cost, in fact it is even better as all this processing power can be had at almost no cost. All that is required is the recruiting of volunteers from around the world to take part in the quest.

The proponents of grid computing say the technology has revolutionized computational biology and other life sciences. Then others who are solution providers are making inroads into engineering and chemical research.

The concept of grid computing using home computers is not new. It first emerged in the late 1990s through a project aimed at finding signals of alien intelligence.

The SETI@home project used connected computers on the Internet to analyze data of radio telescope in the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI).

The project is still ongoing and currently has more than 670,000 participants, making it one of the largest grid computing projects in the world.

Computers today are very powerful but most of the time, most people still use their PCs for word processing, checking e-mail and web surfing. These tasks do not tax up the powerful processors of the PCs. As a matter of fact, these PCs are under utilized

And all these spare cpu power is ideal for a grid computing project, whether it is for the search for aliens or cures for diseases.

The power of grid computing using spare CPU power in PCs was demonstrated at the conclusion of the Anthrax Research Project in 2002. In the demonstration 3.57 billion molecules were screened for suitability as a treatment for advanced-stage anthrax. The project was completed in 24 days. This is something unprecedented according to researchers in the demonstration. This is because it using the traditional methods, such an exercise would have taken years.

However one thing to keep in mind is that participants in various life sciences projects should not expect quick cures to materialize from the current simulations. This is because the virtual screening process is only one of the early stages in a long progression of processes required for the discovery of a new drug.

And once such a drug is identified using computational methods, they can be chemically synthesized in an actual laboratory, and are subjected to stringent controlled testing. Then this is then followed by years of testing to test for any complication and side effects.

As can be seen from the long validation process required, it is therefore not possible to state clearly at this point whether drug candidates produced from grid computing will ultimately result in cures or vaccines.

Still, most researchers agree that grid computing can significantly increase the speed and scope of molecular research. And this includes many pharmaceutical companies as reported in GRIDtoday

However the way I see it, grid computing allow us the ordinary citizens with spare cpu power a chance to contribute directly to the efforts of disease fighting and scientific research. One hell of the way to real virus busting with spare cpu power.

Excess CPUs - Some Ideas to use them

Most homes may have more than one computers and likely they are netowrked together. There is a chance that there is or are some cpus under utilized for example if the cpu is a server serving the other computers internet connection. Then there is an excess of cpu power under utilized.

This article contain a suggestion on 14 ways to use computer , you may pick up an idea or two how to use the excess cpu power into some usefull use. As can be seen from the list, you can use your computers from solving mathmatical equations to solving or finding a cure for AIDS. All these ideas work on the concept of GRID computing, where a large number of computers are linked up together over the internet and get to work as one giant unit. These can be as powerfull as the world's supercomputers.

Now super computers are not cheap and the idea of linking up thousand of computers is a cheap solution to organizations or users who have large amount of data to analyse. All that's is required for such a link up are volunteers willing to download programs onto their home computers and run the software to analyze small chunks of data. The results are then sent back to researchers to crunch further. Just take a look at the type of work that can be done today in the above article. I would say the list is rather impressive. Would this put an end to supercomputers...well personally, I don't think so.

The main reason, supercomputers will not go down the dinosaurs way is that some data to be analysed or simulation to be done could be confidential and of national security concerned. As such these datas will be crunched in private super computers. I am sure, the organization or governement would'nt feel comfortable with these sensitive data being distributed world wide.