Post on 13-Dec-2015
TeraGrid
US based, funded by the NSF High speed network, combines clusters
into one Super-Cluster! Doesn’t just combine computation…
combines storage, sensors, visualisation, all computing resources!
Enables better science
TeraGrid as a Distributed System
Computing resources at different sites TeraGrid to be used as a single system Systems built from individual nodes
Not the only Grid…
Many grids worldwide Examples: EUGrid, I-Grid Individual clusters & supercomputers in
various places, commercial and academic
What can we use Grids for?
Hard & heavy research Applications:
– Geography, weather forecasting– Economics, financial predictions in markets– Physics, simulations, theory verification– Chemistry & Biology, AIDS/Cancer– Raytracing, Encoding Audio/Video, more!
Image/Video Rendering
Toy Story made on a distributed system, a cluster!
117 Sun SparcStations Render farm, a load of machines
rendering different frames of video 114,000 frames, 77 minute movie One computer would have taken 43
years of nonstop computing
Parallel Video Encoding
MPEG
Immersive Environments
Video Walls! Visualisation stuff
Analysis of Video
Shot & Scene detection in Fischlar Slow computation process, goes
through every frame of video to analyse Our beowulf does it 5 times faster than
a large enterprise Sun server, worth 10G!
Search engines
Google, pigeon rank Searching wide database, ideal for
deployment on a cluster *was* driven by 4500 node Linux
Cluster
Breaking Security - Computing
RC5, DES, & distributed.net 2^64 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616)
keys Teams, donated CPU cycles
Other “proper” research
Molecular modelling, drug design Study of viruses, virus propagation AIDS/Cancer research Weather forecasting, climate prediction High Energy Physics Simulation, earth, economics, financial Artificial Intelligence
Other stuff in Distributed Systems
Distributed Software Objects, CORBA Distribued Information = WWW Peer to Peer – Napster and mates
What issues are there?
Organisation Resource Management, Scheduling Optimisation Security Balancing load Handling errors
Linux Cluster
How do they do it?
Split up problems, requires specific analysis for different problems though :-/
Architecture of a cluster, software Parallelising Compilers, why not do it
automatically?
Distributed Systems
Loose definition - collaborative computing
Enables all applications in all areas, however mostly for large stuff
Pushes back the frontiers of what we think we’re able to solve
Better use of our scarce resources!