The promise of grid computing.

I was reading my weekly haul of industry articles when I came across this article on InformationWeek. They mention in the article how IBM “will provide researches and scientists with the ability to harness supercomputer ower, allowing them to simultaneously analyse in one day a volume of cancer biopsy specimens, or tissue microarrays, that would take 13 decades to do with standard PCs”.

Doing the math, thats nearly 5000 times their current computing power. The interesting thing about this isn’t that its 5000 times faster, but that it can be done in one day. When 130 years of raw analysis can be done in one day it means that scientists have the scope to be more speculative about how they spend that computing time – want to try a different calculation? Its only going to cost you a day – not the rest of your life.

It would be interesting to understand the kinds of calculations that are being performed and how easily it could be distributed on gridenvy.com. One of the things that I’ve always had in the back of my head with this thing is “you might help cure cancer”. Given that the grid hasn’t really grown much I doubt it, but I wonder if people would be more keen to connect if the grid was doing something for the good of humanity?

I might be getting my wish.

I’ve been pretty quiet this week working interstate doing the kind of work that pays the bills. While I’ve been mobile I’ve been checking in every day to see how the grid is growing/shrinking over the previous 24 our period.

As you can see from the graph below the 1st of August was the stronges day with a smidge over 250,000 uploads. This is still far short of what my computer can pump by itself.

My current thinking is that maybe I am going to get my wish and that this grid idea is going to fail fast, mostly because I’ve found it difficult to drive the traffic required to start getting a significant amount of processing power. There have been quite a few suggested improvements to the system which I hope to tackle soon, it will be interesting to see whether they make more people want to join the grid.