School Of Computing: e-News

The term 'grid' is taken in analogy with 'electrical power grids'. Electrical power is much like the air that we breathe; it's everywhere. Electrical power grids are amazing systems that distribute electrical power from power plants into your homes and offices to power devices ranging from desk lamps to life support systems in hospitals. We would like to achieve the same with computational power.

The words used to describe the concept are plenty: 'ubiquitous', 'pervasive' and many more. But, the idea is still the same: we would like to make immense computational power available to end-users like you and me without having to buy powerful computers, just as we can switch on a desk lamp without having to buy our own nuclear power plant.

Why do you say that grid computing is going to be the next Internet wave, since the Internet is still mainly about sharing information and communication?

Perhaps it's still mainly about information sharing and communication, but not for long. The Internet is not anymore just about what you can get' from it (i.e. information), but it's also about what you can 'do' with it (i.e. services).

Grid computing ties up all the resources out there into one huge ubiquitous pervasive computational resource on top of which more sophisticated and complex grid applications can be developed.

An important point to take note here is that grid technology is more than just aggregating resources together; it's also about making it usable; and to make grids usable, we must develop technologies that makes life easier for application developers.

Let's take a minute to imagine the complexity here: thousands of computers spread all over a region (perhaps the world); they are non-dedicated (any one of them can go online and offline at anytime); their behaviors are dynamic (because they belong to different people, different organizations); and they may be insecure. In short, this is a monster. So how do we tame this monster so that it can be used to serve us? The answer is grid computing.

Are there any security concerns such as the possibility of malicious hacking? For example, how are they addressed in ALiCE?

SETI and grid computing

Screenshot of the SETI screensaver

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project initiated by UC Berkeley, and mentioned in the movie 'Contact', basically harnesses the computing power of each individual PC linked to its network to analyze the enormous amount of radio data collected by its space telescope.

Anyone who believes in the existence of alien life forms may participate in this quest by downloading a screensaver program from the http://setiathome.berkeley.edu and registering with the SETI server.

While connected to the Internet, the program will activate itself during idle moments just like any other screensaver. Using the computing resources available in a PC, it then process radio spectra as received by the space telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which tracks the skies 24 hours everyday for unusual radio activity believed to be our alien friends attempting to communicate.

Because of the potential load of the data, which could amount to millions of gigabytes each day, it makes more economical sense to use the combined power of the millions of PCs around the world, rather than one or several prohibitively expensive super computers.

Security is a major issue in any distributed computing system. This falls into the point where I mentioned that grid technology is more than just about bringing resources together, it's also about making them usable. One important point that makes the grid usable is the security. Would anyone eat at a restaurant where any stranger can walk into the kitchen and poison the mee goreng? I wouldn't.

In ALiCE, we address the problem by several techniques: secure sockets, encryption, authentication, sand-boxing mechanisms, and many more. ALiCE provides several 'levels' of security. A more secure environment would have effects on performance because some resources will be allocated for the security mechanisms. In ALiCE, we
strictly enforce anonymity among the participating resources. This means that a participating computer would not be able to know what other computers there are in the ALiCE system. This makes life more difficult for hackers.

Contributed by:
Josh San
2nd Year Undergraduate
Media Publications
Student Associates Program

Grid computing - The Next Internet Wave?

SETI and grid computing