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October 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Grid Applications and Contests

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I recently reconnected with an old friend of mine. I've known this person since we were both four years old and we kind of lost touch sometime around the high school years when he moved away. Anyhow, it turns out that he is now working for the FBI and I'd like to think that our childhood games of "cops and robbers" had some influence on his career choice. Even with all of the tools that I'm sure are available to him for searching out people, he simply plugged my name into Google and the breadcrumbs were easy to follow.

After he told me how I was discovered I got to thinking. I had honestly never done a Google search on myself. I mean why would I, I almost always know where I am. I gave it a go anyhow and out popped pretty much what I was suspecting. However, as I dug a little deeper I found items from my long ago (or at least it seems long ago) past such as documentation on particle accelerator control systems that I had authored. OK, so none of what I just said really has any bearing on the topic and hand, but bear with me...

I also happened upon a blog by Dan Hushon, Chief Technologist, Sun Grid. In his blog Dan calls me out for a couple of my past blogs where I question whether grid computing contests the right driver for enterprise, and I suspect one in particular where I am less than supportive of the Sun Cool Apps Developer Contest. But it got me to thinking, what every happened to that contest!

Well, sure enough the contest did have an end and there were winners. Among the winners were an application that grows an optimal neural network of variable size to maximize memory capacity and minimize network size for any training set, a framework and plug-in for the NetBeans IDE, and a general purpose indexing engine and a 3D Fractal Rendering project.

Now I certainly don't mean to belittle any of these projects or the contest winners. I'm quite sure they are each smarter than I can ever hope to be and I shudder to think what my coding skills would have come up with if I blew the cobwebs off. However, none of the applications mentioned seem all that mainstream to me, and some don't sound like applications at all, but enablers for applications.

In Dan's blog he asks if I know of a better way to get to our end goal of agile-distributed-component based-failure resistant-capacity managed-systems. My suggestion is to work from the other side of the problem. Take a known application or application type that suffers from the "never big enough, never fast enough" resource problem Dan mentions in his blog. Again I'll harp on the "Microsoft Excel or equivalent" spread sheet as a great place to start. Instead of building a system that applications may or may not ever be built for, start with a known application and build the system around it.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on October 9, 2006 01:12 PM

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