Research wizard Peet Morris gives his personal take on the hot
issue of the day.One day, impractical, computationally intensive
tasks - such as protein or financial trend analysis - will be
within our reach.
It's done by dividing the job into tiny chunks - and running each
of these on an idle computer connected to the Internet: of which
there are tens of millions. This is one aim of The Grid project
(the Internet to come) - secure, supercomputer power/resources,
using ordinary PCs.
This divide-and-conquer approach isn't new of course; the widely
known SETI screensaver is an example. However, in recent times,
more communally rewarding applications have been found - an example
being found at Oxford University's Centre for Computational Drug
Discovery - which, via its Lifesaver project, is seeking a cure for
cancer.
These projects don't operate in a truly "grid" fashion, however.
Normally, they transfer some data to your machine for processing
and, when it's done, your machine uploads the results back to the
server. It's done chunk by chunk, but not parallel, and so much
more could be achieved if it were truly parallel.
Of course, to participate in this way, you'd have to be connected
to the Internet all of the time. You'd always need to be there as
it were, and, of course, this is impossible using dial-up
access.
For one thing, if you leave your machine connected, chances are
that your ISP will drop your line after two hours. You could always
auto-dial, of course. However, you might even get cut off for doing
this.
Yet, with broadband, I believe the story will be different and who
knows what could be achieved if the spread of broadband access was
wider.
Broadband is an always-on, relatively high-speed Internet
connection, and with it we'll all be able to contribute to these
grid-type efforts properly. However, it'll cost!
So, how about this - I'll make my machine(s) available all of the
time if I'm subsidised by businesses interested in applications
such as financial trend analysis or large-scale number-crunching. A
bit like banner advertising works today - I get some amount of
money per chunk of data my machines process.
http://www.gridforum.orghttp://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.htmlWhat's your view?
Would you connect your PC permanently
to a computational grid if your broadband connection was
subsidised?
Tell us in an e-mail >>CW360.com reserves
the right to edit and publish answers on the Web site. Please state
if your answer is not for publication.
Peet Morris has been a software developer since the 1970s. He
is a D.Phil (PhD) student at Oxford University, where he's
researching Software Engineering, Computational Linguistics and
Computer Science.