NCSSM Grid Computing

Grid computing is a term that describes many computers hooked up to one server machine. The computing part of the name comes from the way problems can be solved: by dividing problems into pieces that can be given to many different computers, the problem is solved more quickly. Think of it like finding a needle in a haystack – if you split the haystack into two piles, and then keep splitting the piles, eventually you have a handful of hay that you can just run a magnet over – there’s your needle. Only in some of our problems, there are thousands of needles, or maybe no needles at all. Point is, each computer is handed a very small amount of work – but the grid computer allows each small amount of work to be added together into a huge project. Cool, huh?

Don’t believe me? See the question, What are TFLOPS?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: No. It’s likely that you only use a small percent, between 1% and 5%, of your computer’s processing power (to check, hit ctrl-alt-del, and scroll down to the bottom. System Idle Processes will read between something like ninety and ninety eight under CPU). This program, which you can download here, will simply use SOME of those idle processes. In fact, about the same percent you’re using. If you ever need the entire computer, the program stops running for that length of time, and then resumes — after downloading, you never need to mess with it again.

Any relatively modern computer, running Windows (2000, XP or Vista), Mac OSX, or Linux.

Grid computing has been set up to do all sorts of problems: SETI@home, standing for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is set up to process data relating to (you guessed it) intelligent life somewhere other than earth. The World Community Grid computer is designed to run programs for AIDS research and other humanitarian projects. Our computer runs local jobs, in addition to loaning our power out to such larger projects. A local example would be our computational chemistry calculations, run in support of the North Carolina High School Computational Server, funded by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the North Carolina Center for Science, Mathematics, and Technology. Propose your own problem here.

Examples:

• http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
• http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
• http://chemistry.ncssm.edu/

… and many other projects.

Why, yes. You can access them here.

TFLOPS: one trillion floating point operations. The best supercomputers run 280. The world grid computer runs over 400.

Well, it’s Miniterm, so the kids are actually structuring everything — see our blogs for daily updates. Once we get everything set up, we’ll start making zombies — the kind of client that does nothing but our work, all the time. Mwuhahaha. Basically we’ll take old computers that would have been trashed otherwise and hook them up to our network. Because they belong to us, they’ll just work for the Grid Computer. But first, we have to set that up, and then configure their operating systems, and so on.

We’ve made a list of software we use. Mr. Menchini also wrote a log of what he did for future reference.