Everyone gives a bit

Forty-five institutions in 17 cities make up India8217;s Garuda grid computing initiative

John Lennon, if he was writing about grid computing, could well have sung, 8216;Imagine all the people sharing all the computers in the world8217;. The more common way is to think of it as hundreds of computershooked up across geographical locations to service complex problems8212;storing, sending and receiving large packets of data.

Experts are seeing grid computing as the next big e-phenomenon after the Internet. The US, Europe and China are already harnessing the power of grid computing to solve science and research problems. At the first international conference on grid computing and e-science hosted in India8212;at Bangalore in the second week of December8212;computer scientists from around the world grappled with the nuts and bolts of making grid computing viable.

Indian experts at the conference announced they were set to move beyond the proof of concept phase to actual usage of grid computing. In February this year, for instance, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN transferred 1 GB of test data equivalent to 1,000 novels with 100,000 words each8212;at a rate of around 34 MB per second it took seven minutes8212;to physicists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research over the Worldwide Large Hallidron Collider Computing Grid. The data transfer via undersea cable systems was part of a prelude to one of the world8217;s biggest physics experiments that is set to kick off when the world8217;s largest accelerator8212;CERN8217;s Large Hallidron Collider is ready.

The experiment involves researchers from 150 institutes in 32 countries who will help CERN process nearly 15 million gigabytes of data generated each year by the accelerator in the search for particles that can answer the mysteries of the origin of the universe. Apart from TIFR, the Saha Institute in Kolkata and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre will be the key Indian centres processing data received from the worldwide LHC grid.

The connectivity between computers in Indian and European research centres is incidentally a part of India8217;s first international grid computing effort under an European Commission sponsored two-year India-EU computing grid project that began in October 2006 and goes on till September 2008.

India8217;s own three-year old national grid computing initiative, Garuda, under the aegis of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, now has the participation of 45 research institutions in 17 cities. Two primary applications8212;flood monitoring and disaster management using satellite data and a bio-informatics grid, the GenomeGrid8212;have emerged as proof of concept to take the Garuda experiment further, C-DAC officials said.

8220;What the Internet was between 1987 and 2007, grid computing is set to become today. Grid computing ideas are only 8-9 years old and in the last five years it has taken a serious turn. In the next three years it will acquire the critical mass for takeoff,8221; says C-DAC Director General S Ramakrishnan.

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The growth of grid computing is linked to falling costs for computer processors, communication networks and improving bandwidth capabilities. 8220;The field is hot and evolving and has the potential to influence how science and collaboration across nations and disciplines is conducted in the future. It is based on a great deal of trust between participants,8221; said Ramakrishnan.

The Garuda network uses a 100 MBPS connection between the institutions and is currently capable of processing 44.7 trillion floating point operations per second teraflops. The Garuda grid features C-DAC8217;s Param Padma super computer apart from super computers at locations like IISc, Bangalore, and around 500 smaller computer clusters in other facilities. 8220;Grid computing need not be applicable only to large research problems,8221; says Ramakrishnan. 8220;We see a future for a health grid in India and for citizen-identity systems.8221;
-JOHNSON T A