November 24, 2008
Next Generation Internet
In the early days of the Internet, communication was limited to the US Defense Department and select academic institutions. Information exchange took place through simple computer terminals using unix-style commands. It was unfriendly until the world wide web placed a graphic front end on the Net.
What is next? A World Wide Grid. Where the Internet is a communications channel between computers, the Grid goes beyond this by not just using the Internet for communications but also as a means of sharing computing resources. Every computer and user can access and make use of the combined resources of the grid. The goal is to have the WWGrid running on top of the Internet and just as its predecessor, it is starting to take shape between academic and scientific institutions. Until recently, also like the Net, it was difficult to use, requiring knowledge of specialised computer languages and coding skills.
A European group, the Eclipse Project, as been developing an easy-to-use, graphical interface which allows access to grid resources with a few mouse clicks. It is called g-Eclipse and can be best described as a browser for what will become the World Wide Grid. It searches for and displays the resources that are available, and allows the user to access them. Complicated computing jobs which need more processing or storage than are available on the user’s system can be sent to the grid. Data can be transferred from the local computer to the grid and workflows can be managed. The project is making use of the Eclipse open-source ecosystem, which has thousands of developers and a very large user base and is host to numerous application development projects from around the world. Eclipse allows us to create a user base and it also means anybody in the world can contribute. Eclipse projects are really transparent and open, more so even than Linux, and source code can simply be reused between Eclipse programs.
The system is active with many individuals and organizations already sending their daily jobs to the grid. They have created a framework that can be used for other developers to build their applications. The system has also been configured for use with computing clouds, and specifically Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Cloud computing allows firms which have installed computer capacity to cope with peak periods, such as the holidays, to hire the excess capacity out. Site administrators expecting unusually heavy traffic can lease tens, hundreds or even thousands of virtual servers from firms like Amazon, for minutes, hours or days at a time as and when the extra capacity is required.
It is the hope that the Eclipse community, having seen the value of the work to date, will continue to push back the boundaries with other developers plugging g-Eclipse into all the grids and clouds which connect to the Internet. It is predicted that a few years down the road g-Eclipse could be a part of everybody’s desktop. Perhaps there will be a layer in computer operating systems which allows applications to be executed on the grid rather than the local desktop. If and when that happens, every PC user could well have access to all of the computing power and speed they could possibly require.
Sources and Links:
Eclipse Project
gEclipse Tools for Grid and Cloud Computing Project
Migrating Desktop Tools
GridBench
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud