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November 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Coming to a Grid Near You...

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Deepak Singh of Washington State offers a very public-spirited and forward-looking vision of HPC in his recent post on his blog Supercomputing 2006 - A vicarious look.

"We need to be in a situation where the average person who wants a specific task done should not be hardware limited (within reason). This includes the scientist who wants to visualize complex scientific data as well as the researcher who wants to run massive MD (molecular dynamics) simulations."

A new Google Earth mashup for Grid Interoperation Now (GIN), which was unveiled at Supercomputing '06, captures the global ambitions and achievements of the grid community nicely. In fact, I found no less than five interoperable grids within 20 miles of my office here in the Chicago area. Granted I live between two National Laboratories, and I'm not sure how two of Fermi's Grids wound up just west of Joliet, but I would be willing to bet that most readers also have at least one grid outpost nearby.

...which leads me to one of the concerns I hear most about grid adoption trends. Deepak Singh puts it this way.

"While community grids probably work well for the kinds of projects listed above, I have always wondered how useful they really are for more specific applications, e.g. a drug discovery effort at a pharma company."

There's that "applications" word again.

At the risk of beating the proverbial dead horse, it's great that I live a stone's throw from five Grids, but at this point that's all I know. If I could drill down and discover what types of applications are available on them and what I need to do to run them I'd be a whole lot more interested.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 27, 2006 09:47 AM

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