Grid computing is no longer just about universities getting together to pool and share their computing power, but increasingly it is about grids of sensors, information and of experts that are shared and leveraged across the world. And now Thailand is playing a major part in this new wave, having recently hosted the 12th meeting of the Pacific Rim Application and Middleware Assembly (Pragma).
Speaking to journalists at Kasetsart University, Pragma chairman Peter Arzberger explained how grid computing today is geared at solving problems that are global in nature, such as environmental change or epidemics.
"You are going to see investment in environmental observation," said Arzberger. "Monitoring is too tacit, observing is much more interactive. As you are going to put more sensors out, we will get a much better sense of human impact.
""We will get a much better idea of what our environment is doing and when we will see phase transition. Whether it's holding back carbon or aspects of water quality, we will get a better sense of what's going to happen," he added.
Arzberger explained that the idea is that once these sensors are put out, they can be shared through the grid and researchers from throughout the world can tap into this information for their research.
"If you look at the film An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, you see a chart. The Earth is inhaling and exhaling carbon. We will see much more of these," he said. "Geoscience is a wonderful new opportunity for collaboration across all our institutions. People worry about floods, tsunami, typhoons and what can be done to evacuate people in time to save lives."
He gave an example of using the traditional computing power of the grid when there is particularly heavy rain and there is a need to predict floods and mudslides.
Another interesting field that uses grids is metagenomics, noted Arzberger. The idea grew out of shotgun sequencing in microbiology where entire colonies of fungi or microbes were being sequenced. The community is hit with enzymes and cut up and the pieces are analysed and genetically sequenced. That was in the 1980s. Today, the idea is to map out points in the ocean and take 200 litres of water, filter out the bacteria and then run the same shotgun genome sequencing approach collectively on all that bacteria.
He said: "You won't know how to reconstruct any particular microbe, but you do know about the community of things, of different proteins that hang out together. What we've found is an incredible number of new proteins. The next step is to take samples form every 200km and look at finding correlations."
If this metagenomic grid is overlaid with environmental grids, and with further metagenomic data from oceans, soils, air and lakes, researchers will start to see trends and better understand the whole genetic biomass of the world.
A grid does not need to be so scientific. Today, the most popular "grid" in the world is BitTorrent, where large files are swarmed and shared over the Internet, a storage grid of sorts.
Pragma was started five years ago and today has as members 30 institutions in 10 out of the 12 Pacific rim countries. It has grown and is now divided up into various working groups--resource, telescience, biological and geological. Thailand, through the National Electronics and Computing Technology Centre (Nectec) was a founding member of Pragma.
Pragma itself grew out of a need for middleware. Arzberger said that while the concept of linking together hundreds and thousands of computers together to solve big problems may sound straightforward, the reality is that problems often take months to complete and there is a lot of management work that middleware can do to see that projects are completed when nodes go offline with incomplete work and new nodes are added.
Arzberger stressed that grids are not just communities of computers, but communities of researchers, of people. "The keyword is trust, and it is the trust among the people in the grid that's so important," he said.
Dr Puchong Uthayopas, director of Sipa's Thai National Grid Centre, explained how TNGC will soon have a 200-node, 400-CPU cluster that will be shared with partners across the region. The motto for the Thai National Grid can be translated as a grid for unity, creativity, sharing and caring, which reflects how the grid is today as much about partnerships as it is about technology.
The Thai National Grid was set up with help from IBM, Sun, HP, Microsoft and Intel. The machines for the latest phase are HP machines. IBM in Bangalore, India is helping to provide training, Puchong added.
Nectec's Dr Piyawut Srichaikul, who is also deputy chair of Pragma, explained that when Nectec first started on the path to grid computing, it was in the days of the 33MHz 80486 CPU. What was needed in those days was high performance computing. It was with this in mind that Nectec became a founding member of Pragma back in 1995. Others came at Grid computing from a need for redundancy and fault tolerance rather than outright performance, but the two sides have come together in recent years.
He said the concept of grid computing was very much in line with the philosophy of the "sufficiency economy". "Today, if the Thai National Grid is full, we can borrow from our friends," he said.
However, Arzberger said that not much of the IT developed by Pragma was applicable in the commercial world as it was simply too specialized, though some aspects of management were applicable.
One new trend in grid computing is how to handle the vast amount of data. In the past, data was moved to computing resources. Soon, it will be the computation environment that is being moved along with the data and run on virtual machines somewhere in the world.
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