Hope of grid calculations: commercial applications
Imagine: A ticket company is going to sell the rolling stone band's farewell show, IT department manager is worried, will the company's server and software will not be overwhelmed after starting online ticketing? But in fact, the company does not add dozens of servers and storage System, about IT staff just unscrew the switch, and the company's backbone network is associated with a "grid". Results The company sold 900,000 tickets within 3 minutes, no customers were rejected outside the door due to insufficient system processing capacity. The above scenarios are not expected to be instead. The grid can be used as a new network that can bring huge processing, storage capabilities, and other IT resources. Grid calculations associate a large number of computers of different locations by sharing networks, resulting in virtual supercomputers, together with excess processor capabilities of each computer, providing huge processing capabilities for research and other data concentration applications. With grid computing, those institutions that have no ability to buy millions of dollars, can also take advantage of their huge computing power. Calculate "Utopia"? Gartner's Rob Batchelder believes that the consciousness of the grid has always been "Utopia" in the field, although there is a huge future in technology applications, but the biggest drawback is lack of significant commercial applications. Since the emergence of Europe and the United States since the 1990s, the grid is mainly used to help the scattered university researchers analyze the data of the particle accelerator and giant telescope. However, in the past two years, the concept of grid and Globus Toolkit have been widely used in research and education, and dozens of global projects use these technologies to challenge mass calculations in scientific calculations. At present, the grid technology is mainly controlled by academic institutions, but companies are also following up. In fact, the main sponsors of the Global Grid Forum include UnileVer - a company named through a pin soap, ice cream. Like many companies that are studying and assessing grid technology, Unilever's constipation is constipation for how to use this technology. Johnson & Johnson and Merck and other pharmaceutical companies, BMW and Boeing and other manufacturing companies have used this technology to process the processing capability and storage space for simulation, such as whether the drug can protect the cell from viral invasion? Will the airplane wing break in the storm? Genetic research is the natural application of grid technology. The investment required for this area is difficult to be borne by a company. Biotechnology enterprises can use mesh technology to analyze gene data; doctors can use grid technology to produce patient organs 3D models As a auxiliary means for diagnosing the disease; the grid can handle data streams from store cash records or financial markets. Other industries, such as aviation, insurance, transportation and national defense, will benefit from it. In this regard, grid calculation is not a Utopia that is desirable, and its commercial application is in front of you. Striving for control grid computing is known as the "Third Information Technology Wave" after Internet and Web, which is expected to provide next-generation distributed applications and services, have a profound impact on research and information system development. The main IT manufacturer has long been a competition for the control of the grid computing. Sun recently released the "Grid Engine" version 5.3 test version, so that the computer grid's computer grid's computer grid is easier to join, providing better management and resource allocation. The grid engine software provides an open source version. Since 2000, it has been downloaded from 12,000 times, a total of 118,000 CPUs use the software to manage. Peter JeffCock, the company, believes that the grid computing has a significant three stages: cluster mesh, campus grid, and global grid, the currently released Grid Engine Enterprise Edition 5.3 makes Sun to the functional campus grid into a step . Sun also supports Avaki and Globus and other industrial organizations with competitors to actively participate in the establishment of grid computing open standards.
Microsoft's research sector also participated in various distributed computing research projects, including fault-tolerant remote file system Farsite, and Millenium in the construction of a distributed system; HP also indicates that CoolBase software will be provided, users can share various computing devices through Internet; Compaq Announces a global grid computing solution plan to provide hardware and software and technical support to customers who seek a grid computing system. To this end, Compaq has allocated the Canadian Platform Computing, making full use of the technology, and the Compaq Tru64 Unix Alpha server system and the Compaq ProLiant server running Linux, provides users with complete, integrated, open grid solutions. Compaq has also established a Grid Computing Advanced Research Center to continue to study this technology. Japan companies are also eager to try in grid computing. NTT announced that it will carry out six months of grid computing tests in mid-2002, participants include Intel, SGI, etc. In August this year, IBM announced $ 4 billion in the field of grid computing, building 40 data centers around the world, officially entered the field of grid computing. IBM is selected by the British government, responsible for the National Grid project, this budget reaches $ 25 million of netbooks to connect 8 universities. IBM is currently working with the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, couples several hospitals and build a complex computing grid. Participated in hospitals can quickly use distant medical data and share the analysts. A few days ago, IBM also announced a project called North Carolina Biological Information Science Grid, involving 60 companies, universities and biomedical research companies, which is the world's first grid project mainly based on private industries. At this time, it is only 3 months from IBM into the grid calculation. It seems that IBM is "leading sheep" to be determined to do grid technology. So, whether the implementation of this project is logo grid computing has begun to enter business applications? The standard is the key to the key to the TCP / IP protocol is the core of the Internet. Building grid computing also requires definition of standard protocols and services. Currently, including the Global Grid Forum, the object management organization (OMG) of Model Driven Architecture is committed to the W3C, which is committed to the network service and semantic WWW research, and the standardized groups such as globus.org are ready to move. In July this year, standardized organizations such as OMG, W3C, Grid Forum were attended by people from academic and commercial sectors, and accelerated the development of GGG standards. Then, another open source mesh standard organization - Globus also ranked infrastructure issues that passed the high performance calculation of the wide area network. Globus is currently working on the development of standard grid architecture and other technologies. To date, mesh calculations have not formal standards, but in core technology, relevant institutions and companies have reached a consensus: Globus Toolkit, which is developed by the United States ARGONNE National Laboratory and South California University School of Information Science (ISI) has become a network Decreasing standards, including Entropia, IBM, Microsoft, Compaq, Cray, SGI, Sun, Veridian, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, have announced that the globus toolkit will be used. As an open architecture and open standard infrastructure, Globus Toolkit provides a lot of basic services needed to build grid applications, such as security, resource discovery, resource management, data access, and more. All major grid projects are currently based on Globus TookIT. In addition to standards, safety and manageability, IT talents are also a problem that messengers need to be solved, otherwise it will not be a commercial architecture of the company. Internal system environments often vision, such as security, certification, and reliability, must be resolved in any distributed environment.
