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7 December 2000

Internet Computing and the Emerging Grid

IAN FOSTER

When the network is as fast as the computer's internal links,

the machine disintegrates across the net into a set of special
purpose appliances.
-- Gilder Technology Report, June 2000.

Internet computing and Grid technologies promise to change the way we

tackle complex problems. They will enable large-scale aggregation and
sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional
boundaries. And harnessing these new technologies effectively will
transform scientific disciplines ranging from high-energy physics to the
life sciences.

The data challenge

Fifty years of innovation have CERN

increased the raw speed of individual
computers by a factor of around one
million, yet they are still far too slow
for many challenging scientific
problems. For example, detectors at
the Large Hadron Collider at CERN,
the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics, by 2005 will be producing
several petabytes of data per year -- a
million times the storage capacity of Each of LEC's heavy-ion collision
the average desktop computer. experiments may yield up to 2000
subsiduary particles, observed via
Performing the most rudimentary
180,000 data channels.
analysis of these data will probably
require the sustained application of some 20 teraflops (floating-point
operations) per second of computing power. Compare this with the 3
teraflops per second produced by the fastest contemporary supercomputer,
and it is clear that more sophisticated analyses will need orders of
magnitude more power.

Cluster and conquer

One solution to the problem of inadequate computer power is to 'cluster'

multiple individual computers. This technique, first explored in the early
1980s, is now standard practice in supercomputer centres, research labs
and industry. The fastest supercomputers in the world are collections of

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microprocessors, such as the 8,000-processor ASCI White system at

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Many research
laboratories operate low-cost PC clusters or 'farms' for computing or data
analysis. This year's winner in the Gordon Bell Award for price-
performance in supercomputing achieved US$0.92 per megaflop per
second on an Intel Pentium III cluster. And good progress has been made
on the algorithms needed to exploit thousands of processors effectively.

Although clustering can provide significant improvements in total

computing power, a cluster remains a dedicated facility, built at a single
location. Financial, political and technical constraints place limits on how
large such systems can become. For example, ASCI White cost $110
million and needed an expensive new building. Few individual institutions
or research groups can afford this level of investment.

Internet Computing

Rapid improvements in communications technologies are leading many to

consider more decentralized approaches to the problem of computing
power. There are over 400 million PCs around the world, many as
powerful as an early 1990s supercomputer. And most are idle much of the
time. Every large institution has hundreds or thousands of such systems.
Internet computing seeks to exploit otherwise idle workstations and PCs to
create powerful distributed computing systems with global reach and
supercomputer capabilities.

The opportunity represented by idle computers has been recognized for

some time. In 1985, Miron Livny showed that most workstations are often
idle1, and proposed a system to harness those idle cycles for useful work.
Exploiting the multitasking possible on the popular Unix operating system
and the connectivity provided by the Internet, Livny's Condor system is
now used extensively within academia to harness idle processors in
workgroups or departments. It is used regularly for routine data analysis as
well as for solving open problems in mathematics. At the University of
Wisconsin, for example, Condor regularly delivers 400 CPU days per day
of essentially "free" computing to academics at the university and
elsewhere: more than many supercomputer centres.

But although Condor is effective on a small scale, true mass production of

Internet computing cycles had to wait a little longer for the arrival of more
powerful PCs, the spread of the Internet, and problems (and marketing
campaigns) compelling enough to enlist the help of the masses. In 1997,
Scott Kurowski established the Entropia network to apply idle computers
worldwide to problems of scientific interest. In just two years, this network
grew to encompass 30,000 computers with an aggregate speed of over one
teraflop per second. Among its several scientific achievements is the
identification of the largest known prime number.

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Figure 1 Performance of the

Entropia network.

High resolution image and legend

(43k)

The next big breakthrough in Internet computing was David Anderson's

SETI@home project. This enlisted personal computers to work on the
problem of analysing data from the Arecibo radio telescope for signatures
that might indicate extraterrestrial intelligence. Demonstrating the curious
mix of popular appeal and good technology required for effective Internet
computing, SETI@home is now running on half-a-million PCs and
delivering 1,000 CPU years per day -- the fastest (admittedly special-
purpose) computer in the world.

Entropia, Anderson's United Devices,

and other entrants have now gone
commercial, hoping to turn a profit by
selling access to the world's idle
computers -- or the software required
to exploit idle computers within an
enterprise. Significant venture funding
has been raised, and new The SETI@home internet computing
"philanthropic" computing activities project has become the world's largest
have started that are designed to distributed computer.
appeal to PC owners. Examples
include Parabon's Compute-against-Cancer, which analyses patient
responses to chemotherapy, and Entropia's FightAidsAtHome project,
which uses the AutoDock package to evaluate prospective targets for drug
discovery. Although the business models that underlie this new industry
are still being debugged, the potential benefits are enormous: for instance,
Intel estimates that its own internal "Internet computing" project has saved
it $500 million over the past ten years.

What does this all mean for science and the scientist? A simplistic view is
that scientists with problems amenable to Internet computing now have
access to a tremendous new computing resource. All they have to do is
cast their problem in a form suitable for execution on home computers --
and then persuade the public (or an Internet computing company) that their
problem is important enough to justify the expenditure of "free" cycles.

The Grid

But the real significance is broader. Internet computing is just a special

case of something much more powerful -- the ability for communities to
share resources as they tackle common goals. Science today is
increasingly collaborative and multidisciplinary, and it is not unusual for

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teams to span institutions, states, countries and continents. E-mail and the
web provide basic mechanisms that allow such groups to work together.
But what if they could link their data, computers, sensors and other
resources into a single virtual laboratory? So-called Grid technologies2
seek to make this possible, by providing the protocols, services and
software development kits needed to enable flexible, controlled resource
sharing on a large scale.

Grid computing concepts were first explored in the 1995 I-WAY

experiment, in which high-speed networks were used to connect, for a
short time, high-end resources at 17 sites across North America. Out of
this activity grew a number of Grid research projects that developed the
core technologies for "production" Grids in various communities and
scientific disciplines. For example, the US National Science Foundation's
National Technology Grid and NASA's Information Power Grid3 are both
creating Grid infrastructures to serve university and NASA researchers,
respectively. Across Europe and the United States, the closely related
European Data Grid, Particle Physics Data Grid and Grid Physics Network
(GriPhyN) projects plan to analyse data from frontier physics experiments.
And outside the specialized world of physics, the Network for Earthquake
Engineering Simulation Grid (NEESgrid) aims to connect US civil
engineers with the experimental facilities, data archives and computer
simulation systems used to engineer better buildings.

The creation of large-scale infrastructure requires the definition and

acceptance of standard protocols and services, just as the Internet Protocol
(TCP-IP) is at the heart of the Internet. No formal standards process as yet
exists for Grids (the Grid Forum is working to create one). Nonetheless,
we see a remarkable degree of consensus on core technologies. Essentially
all major Grid projects are being built on protocols and services provided
by the Globus Toolkit4, which was developed by my group at Argonne
National Laboratory in collaboration with Carl Kesselman's team at the
University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, and
other institutions. This open-architecture and open-source infrastructure
provides many of the basic services needed to construct Grid applications5
such as security, resource discovery, resource management and data
access.

The Future

Although Internet and Grid computing are both new technologies, they
have already proven themselves useful and their future looks promising.
As technologies, networks and business models mature, I expect that it
will become commonplace for small and large communities of scientists to
create "Science Grids" linking their various resources to support human
communication, data access and computation. I also expect to see a variety
of contracting arrangements between scientists and Internet computing
companies providing low-cost, high-capacity cycles. The result will be
integrated Grids in which problems of different types can be routed to the

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most appropriate resource: dedicated supercomputers for specialized

problems that require tightly coupled processors and idle workstations for
more latency tolerant, data analysis problems.

Web links

Popular internet computing projects:

SETI@home setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
Folding@home www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm
Compute-against-Cancer www.parabon.com/cac.jsp
Fight AIDS@home www.fightaidsathome.org
Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search mersenne.org
Casino 21: Climate simulation www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk

Internet computing companies:

Entropia www.entropia.com
United Devices www.uniteddevices.com
Parabon www.parabon.com
Popular Power www.popularpower.com

Grid projects:

Grid Physics Network project www.griphyn.org

European Data Grid grid.web.cern.ch/grid
Particle Physics Data Grid www.ppdg.net
Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Grid
www.neesgrid.org
The Globus Project www.globus.org
The Global Grid Forum www.gridforum.org

References

1. Mutka, M. & Livny, M. The Available Capacity of a Privately

Owned Workstation Environment. Performance Evaluation 12,
269-284 (1991).
2. Foster, I. & Kesselman, C. (Eds). The Grid: Blueprint for a New
Computing Infrastructure. Morgan-Kaufmann (1999).
3. Johnston, W., Gannon, D. & Nitzberg, W. Grids as Production
Computing Environments: The Engineering Aspects of NASA's
Information Power Grid, Proc. 8th Symposium on High
Performance Distributed Computing, IEEE Computer Society Press
(1999).
4. Foster, I. & Kesselman, C. Globus: A Toolkit-Based Grid
Architecture. In ref. 2, pages 259-278. Morgan Kaufmann
Publishers (1999).
5. Butler, R., Engert, D., Foster, I., Kesselman, C., Tuecke, S., Volmer,
J., & Welch, V. Design and Deployment of a National-Scale

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Authentication Infrastructure. IEEE Computer (in press).

6. The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations.
Foster, I., Kesselman, C., Tuecke, S. www.globus.org/research
/papers/anatomy.pdf

Dr. Ian Foster is a Senior Scientist and Associate Division

Director in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at
Argonne National Laboratory, and Professor of Computer
Science at the University of Chicago. He co-leads the Globus
Project, a multi-institutional R&D project focused on the
development and application of Grid technologies. His research
is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, National Science
Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, and
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. More
information is available at www.mcs.anl.gov/~foster. Ian Foster
is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Entropia,
Inc.

Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2000 Registered No. 785998

England.

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