The Buffalo News

UB IS LINKING ITS SUPERCOMPUTER TO A GRID

Published on November 23, 2003
Author:    FRED O. WILLIAMS - News Business Reporter
© The Buffalo News Inc.

Imagine drawing computer brainpower from a "grid" of far-away machines, instead of from a PC on your desk. A computing grid could supply number-crunching power through wires as needed, the way a power grid supplies electricity.

One plus: you might not have to buy a new computer every few years to keep up with software. "All the upgrades, everything's taken care of for you; you pay a fee every month," said Dave Tapper, senior analyst at IDC Corp.

Experts say that grid or utility computing remains years away for homes and most businesses. But universities and big corporations are already building grids to attack math-intensive problems and to harness unused computer time. And some of the technology's foundations are being laid here in Western New York.

At the University at Buffalo, computer scientists devised a grid that links UB's supercomputer in Amherst with medical research centers near downtown. The grid allows researchers at the Hauptman Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo to train more firepower on the computation-intensive task of mapping protein molecules, UB officials said.

Also plugged into the grid are workstations in some UB classrooms that sit idle much of the time, letting calculation capacity or "cycles" go unused.

"Grad students may work from 2 p.m. to 4 a.m. -- the rest of the day, we can steal those cycles," said Russ Miller, director of UB's Center for Computational Research.

Miller was in Phoenix last week for a supercomputer conference that highlighted UB's grid computing achievements. In addition to the local grid, UB is hooking 464 of its processors to a national project that links machines at CalTech, Harvard and others.

The key to grid computing is code called "middleware" that allows computers from different makers, in far-flung locations, to work together as if they were one machine. The code needs to do this while keeping intact the privacy rules and other limits set locally by the machines' owners. Since the Internet and other networks that share information are already well developed, they provide a platform for the further step of shared processing, experts say.

While researchers see grids as a way to put more muscle behind computation-intensive problems, businesses see a way to squeeze more use out of their costly hardware.

According to IBM Corp., a seller of grid technology, typical office PC users tap only 10 to 20 percent of their processor capacity. Harnessing the rest could delay costly upgrades that corporations face.

"All these companies have huge amounts of information technology infrastructure, (but) it's not joined together and acting as a whole," said Dan Powers, vice president of strategy and technology for grid computing at IBM and a native of Jamestown.

"If you add it up, the numbers start to be pretty astronomical . . . grid computing is the way people are going to capture that."

Stockbroker Charles Schwab, for instance, linked servers that brokers use in New York with a massive computer bank that processes online stock orders. Since the online business is built to handle sudden surges in trading, its servers are idling much of the time. By tapping that unused processing capacity, brokers can recalculate a client's retirement income stream in 15 to 30 seconds, instead of four minutes the math-heavy task took before, Powers said.

"Now they can do it while the client is on the phone . . . it's allowed them to offer incredible customer services," he said.

For small businesses and home users, buying computer processing cycles from a grid provider would allow them to cut their computer investment to a low-end machine with a network connection, Tapper of IDC said. He predicts utility-type computer services will be bundled with cable or phone company Internet services a few years down the road.

"Your entertainment and communications are delivered by wires now . . . why not processing," he said.

Powers at IBM said he doubts that full-blown grid computing will ever make sense for home users, whose computational needs are more than adequately handled by a PC processor.

However, limited purpose grids that harness unused resources are already tapping millions of home computers, he noted, providing their owners with a novel way to help a cause they support.

For example, United Devices in Austin harnessed PCs from volunteers in 190 countries to screen drug candidates for a smallpox cure. The volunteers loaded software on their computer that downloaded pieces of the problem. When their PC was idle, the software matched molecules with a critical smallpox protein, scored the results, and sent the data back to project organizers. In six months, the volunteers screened 35 million potential drug molecules to see which might bind with the smallpox protein and stop the virus from replicating, United Devices said.

"People at home who participate in grids will donate their PC cycles for a worthy cause," Powers said.

Similar projects have broken records for calculating Pi and are used to analyze radio telescope data for evidence of life on other planets. With 650 million PCs plugged in worldwide, volunteers collaborating on projects via grids could become a powerful force.

e-mail: fwilliams@buffnews.com

"Grad students may work from 2 p.m. to 4 a.m. -- the
rest of the day, we can steal those cycles."
Russ Miller, director of UB's Center for Computational Research

<
Search again: