Seeking the components
In Australia, research and development work going into grid computing is spread across a series of collaborative efforts featuring universities, the private sector and the CSIRO. According to Dave Abel, deputy chief in the CSIRO mathematical and information sciences arm, there are about five core teams working on grid computing projects in Australia, although there is a great deal of collaboration between the different groups.
"One of our primary goals right now is getting a grip on what the technology is, and what is out there already," Abel says. "This is a niche which Australia can make its own."
Broadly speaking, work on grid computing in Australia can be divided into two areas; the high-powered networks which will enable the grids to operate, and software components which includes resource brokering systems such as Monash University's Nimrod/G resource broker as well as applications development.
David Abramson, head of the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash, traces the Australian roots of distributed computing back to a Commonwealth Government-sponsored Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC), founded in 1994.
"Originally I was interested in providing an environment where scientists and engineers could use distributed computers to solve big problems faster," Abramson says. "We were using parametric computing, similar to what runs behind an Excel spreadsheet."
It was about this time that Nimrod (a precursor to Monash's NimrodG) was born. Written in Python, the software allowed large algorithms to be processed across a range of otherwise inactive computers, and complied the results.
"It caused a real paradigm shift - at that time there were just problems that were just too big," Abramson says. "We were able to solve them using idle workstations."
At about the same time this first incarnation of Nimrod was being spun-off into a company by the name of Active Tools, the Globus project started gaining the attention of the international academic community. Designed to assist in the development and running of distributed systems, Globus was quickly picked up by universities around the world.
These days, Nimrod/G provides an architecture for a resource management and scheduling system in a global computational grid, and Globus has become the accepted standard for the middleware which enables such grids to operate.
I'd gladly donate excess processing power of 3 PCs except I'm capped on data. I think most Australian's would give excess processing time to the scientific community if they didn't have to worry about their data cap being used up in a day. Sorry, Telstra and the lack of initiative from the Federal Government is the scientific communities greatest bane to achievment of their greatest hope.