Making the connections
The other major project currently under development in Australia is based in the Australian National University in Canberra. GrangeNet (Grid And Next Generation Network) represents a collaboration of the Australian Academic Research Network (AARNet), the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), the DSTC, Powertel and Cisco. The group aims to create high capacity network connections running between Melbourne and Brisbane.
Once built, the GrangeNet infrastructure will provide a ten gigabit backbone running from Melbourne to Sydney, via Canberra, with a further five gigabit connection into Brisbane.
Such infrastructure will allow the integration of high-performance computing services, support distributed user communities, and enable Australian Universities to participate in Grid computing test beds running in the Asia-Pacific region, North America and Europe.
Dr Marcus Buchhorn, grid services coordinator for GrangeNet, says the resources will then be available for private and public sector groups that are interested in using the networked service to develop or utilise applications.
"Within Australia, GrangeNet is in the process of setting up working groups and getting the infrastructure together so that the researchers working on grid projects get access to the resources they need," Buchhorn says.
Creating a Grid bank
While the cutting edge development in Australia is largely being carried out in universities, cluster computing and even grid computing is already making its presence felt in the commercial sector.
Kevin Mayo, enterprise architect at Sun Microsystems, says many of the key components for the creation of a computational grid are available off-the-shelf and are already being implemented by the tertiary education and commercial sectors in Australia.
"The software component takes a bunch of machines and connects them together so that you can logically treat them as a single machine and is now accessible through what I like to call a blue curtain," Mayo says. "This is portal software that makes operations within the grid engine transparent and readily accessible."
According to Mayo, IT buyers in the corporate and government sectors are prepared to forgo a certain amount of a system's overall processing power in exchange for ease-of-use and a painless implementation.
"Grid computing is no longer a black art now that you can buy the tools and a grid together with relative ease, and handle all the scheduling requirements through a portal software," Mayo explains.
However, researchers such as Buyya and Abramson have a vision of grid computing which goes beyond amassing processing power within a single university or corporation.
"We are developing the software to support a grid bank, where resources from different organisations can become part of the cooperative environment," Buyya says. "If you are looking at taking grid computing to the global level and make it work commercially, participants will need to offer their services for a profit, so the infrastructure will allow for resource sharing and grid management."
According to such a vision, participants are linked through a resources broker which monitors how much processing power is being used, and who it is being used by. Participants are able to gain credits when their systems are utilised by others, and use these later to purchase their own processing requirements.
"The key is to offer, select and aggregate resources based on individual requirements," Buyya explains. "If grid computing is to work commercially, participants need to be able to operate within deadlines and budgets. Commercially, we need to provide access to greater levels of bandwidth and processing power at a premium."
Buyya is also looking at fast-tracking the process by which applications are implemented across the grid system, and believes Australia is well placed to crack the quality of service requirements of commercial grid systems.
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.