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Expatriate Indian develops computing
grid
Frederick Noronha (IANS)
Pune, May
31
Those who need to do some serious number crunching that their
personal computer or even a more powerful computer cannot handle
can turn to an Australia-based Indian expatriate for help.
Researcher Rajkumar
Buyya, originally from Karnataka, has developed a
grid of computers made up by linking a university supercomputer
with a cluster of servers hundreds of km away and scattered workstations
across the globe.
Grid computing tries to pull together large amounts of far-flung computing
power to tackle complex applications.
The
grid is coordinated by software that mediates different computer
operating systems and manages tasks like scheduling and security
to create sophisticated virtual computers that work like a team
though they may be scattered across the world.
Buyya, an assistant professor at the University of Melbourne, told
IANS: "I have developed a system that supports service-oriented
worldwide computing. It allows the creation of an online computing
marketplace. The system has been used for running applications
such as drug design."
He was part of a group of researchers at Monash University in
Australia and the European Council for Nuclear Research in Switzerland
that proposed a scheme with the potential to increase the reach
of grid
computing by applying traditional economic models - ranging
from barter to monopoly - to manage
grid resource supply and demand.
Buyya, who used to work for the computer science department at Monash
University, says these methods could facilitate a broad range
of computing services applications.
For instance, they can be used in executing science, engineering,
industrial and commercial applications such as drug design,
automobile design, crash simulation, aerospace modelling, high-energy
physics, astrophysics, earth modelling, data mining and financial
modelling.
Though still mostly confined to researchers, Internet has given
grid computing a boost. Peer-to-peer computing - this allows
disparate users to dedicate portions of their computers to team
up for cooperative processing via the Internet - is mostly attractive
to consumers and businesses.
"Both models harness a potentially vast amount of computing
power in the form of excess, spare or dedicated system resources
from the entire range of computers spread out across the Internet,"
says a technical study.
Although peer-to-peer and
grid computing are not new, there hasn't been an overarching
scheme for handling the massive amount of bargaining and staging
required to carry out such on-demand jobs with reliable levels
of quality and pricing to match,
Buyya says. That is what the team he is part of is trying
to do now.
Their work would allow parties involved to agree on one price
for quick delivery of services during times of peak demand and
another for less urgent delivery.
Resource brokering and sharing tools - like those of the once-popular
music-sharing site Napster - are expected to eventually handle
the trade in access to computers, content, scientific and technical
instruments, databases and software,
Buyya says.
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