“Here comes the Grid”
Mark Hayes Technical Director - Cambridge eScience Centre
NIEeS Summer School 2003
In the beginning…
"The collection of people, hardware, and software... will become a node in a geographically distributed computer network…. Through the network... all the large computers can communicate with one another. And through them, all the members of the community can communicate with other people, with programs, with data, or with a selected combination of those resources.”
J.C.R.Licklider, “The Computer as a Communication Device”Science and Technology, April 1968
The ARPAnet in 1970
International bandwidth
From “3D geographic network displays” - Cox et al, ACM Sigmod Record - December 1996
The World Wide Web
Invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 as a tool for collaboration and information sharing in the particle physicscommunity.
Early distributed computing
1.2 million CPU years so far...
Brute force attempt to crack strong encryption
Protein folding
The Grid - 1998
Editors: Foster & Kesselman
700 pages22 chapters40 authors
Analogy with the electricalpower grid - just plug in.
The Grid - 2003
Editors: Berman, Hey, Fox
1000 pages43 chapters116 authors
Applications, data sharing andvirtual communities.
4 types of Grid
• CPU intensive cycle scavenging (SETI@home)
• Data sharing
• Application provision
• Human-human interaction (e.g. Access Grid)
SETI@home
The world’s most powerful computerdelivered 52 Teraflops/second yesterday (Earth Simulator is 35 Tflop/s, sum of top 2-10 is 60Tflop/s)
Latest Statshttp://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/totals.html
6th July 2003
4.5 E+18 flops/day
52 Teraflops/s3 E+21 ops3 zeta ops
Floating Point Operations
1,226 years1.5 M yearsTotal CPU time
1.1 M944 MResults received
1,2264,570,474Users
Last 24 HoursTotal
The data explosion - some big numbers
FTP and GREP are not adequate (Jim Gray)
• CFD turbulence simulations - 100TB• BaBar particle physics experiment - 1TB/day• CERN LHC will generate 1GB/s or 10PB/year• VLBA radio telescope generates 1GB/s today• NCBI/EMBL database is “only 0.5TB” but doubling each year• brain imaging - 4TB/brain at full colour, 10m resolution (4PB/brain at 1m i.e. cellular resolution)• Pixar - 100TB/movie
Application provision
• Google - 10K cpus, 2PB database (2 years ago)
• free email services - HotMail, Yahoo! 2-10PB storage
• netsolve - numerical algorithms on demand with Matlab & Mathematica plugins
• renderfarm.net - graphics rendering on demand
The Access Grid
“...one of the most compelling glimpses into the future I’ve seen since I first saw NCSA Mosaic.” Larry Smarr
Ambient mic(tabletop)
Presentermic
Presentercamera
Audience camera
High end video conferencingand collaboration technology.
O(100) nodes world wide.
• 1 day of cpu time
• 4 GB ram for a day
• 1 GB of network bandwidth
• 1 GB of disk storage
• 10 M database accesses
• 10 TB of disk access (sequential)
• 10 TB of LAN bandwidth (bulk)
£1 buys...
How do you move a terabyte?
14 minutes6172001,920,0009600OC 192
2.2 hours1000Gbps
1 day100100 Mpbs
14 hours97631649,000155OC3
2 days2,01065128,00043T3
2 months2,4698001,2001.5T1
5 months360117700.6Home DSL
6 years3,0861,000400.04Home phone
Time/TB$/TBSent
$/MbpsRent
$/monthSpeedMbps
Context
Source: Terascale SneaketNet, Jim Gray et al
Compute cycles are (almost) free...
by comparison with network costs.
-The cheapest and fastest way to move 1TB of data out from CERN is still by FedEx.
Though this considers only bandwidth,
low latency networks are even more expensive!
(MPI over WAN doesn’t work well.)
Some consequences
A distributed community of users.
Tiny network input & output, huge compute requirement.
Database access & storage is also expensive,
therefore put the computation near the data.
What makes a good Grid application?