Australian grid computing: Creating science fact

This is probably why the SETI@home project run through Berkley University in the US has inspired nearly 4 million computer owners around their world to offer up some of their processing power to scanning the cosmos for signs of intelligent life.

Four years after its launch, the SETI@home software is running across no less than 127 operating systems in 226 different countries, and has managed to spew out half a billion results.

Even before the Linux-based Beowulf project kicked-off in the mid-nineties, distributed computing was allowing researches to overcome limitations in processor size. COWs (Cluster of Workstations), NOWs (Network of Workstations) and PoPCs (Piles of PCs) have seen computers linked-up and problems broken down, so as to be solved over these distributed -grid" architectures.

However, a Grid, and the Grid are different concepts altogether, according to Argonne National Labs' Grid guru Ian Foster. Whereas distributed or cluster computing pools the processing resources of a series of computers of all shapes and sizes, grid computing takes this concept one step further, allowing for detailed scheduling, high levels of service and distributed control.

"The promise of grid computing is, in the back end, you can start doing much more dynamic resource provisioning than was possible with cluster computing, and then on the front end you can make it possible to acquire resources from different locations, rather than dealing with static operations," Foster explains.

Closer to home, Rajkumar Buyya, assistant professor and lecturer at Melbourne University makes the following distinction.

"Cluster computing is about resources aggregation in a single administrative domain," he explains. "Grid computing in about resource sharing and aggregation across multiple domains."

Having recently completed a doctoral thesis outlining the economic paradigm which might underpin such a system in the commercial environment, Buyya points to the Grid's scheduling capabilities as the most crucial difference between grid and cluster computing.

"As part of the Gridbus project, We are developing the software to support a grid bank, where resources from different organisations can become part of the cooperative environment," Buyya says. "We need to design a system where deadline, budget and service level requirements can be guaranteed."