TeraGrid

1
TeraGrid

• US based, funded by the NSF
• High speed network, combines clusters into one
  Super-Cluster!
• Doesnt just combine computation combines
  storage, sensors, visualisation, all computing
  resources!
• Enables better science

2
TeraGrid as a Distributed System

• Computing resources at different sites
• TeraGrid to be used as a single system
• Systems built from individual nodes

3
Not the only Grid

• Many grids worldwide
• Examples EUGrid, I-Grid
• Individual clusters supercomputers in various
  places, commercial and academic

4
What can we use Grids for?

• Hard heavy research
• Applications
• Geography, weather forecasting
• Economics, financial predictions in markets
• Physics, simulations, theory verification
• Chemistry Biology, AIDS/Cancer
• Raytracing, Encoding Audio/Video, more!

5
Image/Video Rendering
6
Toy Story made on a distributed system, a cluster!

• 117 Sun SparcStations
• Render farm, a load of machines rendering
  different frames of video
• 114,000 frames, 77 minute movie
• One computer would have taken 43 years of nonstop
  computing

7
Parallel Video Encoding

• MPEG

8
Immersive Environments

• Video Walls! Visualisation stuff

9
Analysis of Video

• Shot Scene detection in Fischlar
• Slow computation process, goes through every
  frame of video to analyse
• Our beowulf does it 5 times faster than a large
  enterprise Sun server, worth 10G!

10
Search engines

• Google, pigeon rank
• Searching wide database, ideal for deployment on
  a cluster
• was driven by 4500 node Linux Cluster

11
Breaking Security - Computing

• RC5, DES, distributed.net
• 264 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) keys
• Teams, donated CPU cycles

12
Other proper research

• Molecular modelling, drug design
• Study of viruses, virus propagation
• AIDS/Cancer research
• Weather forecasting, climate prediction
• High Energy Physics
• Simulation, earth, economics, financial
• Artificial Intelligence

13
Other stuff in Distributed Systems

• Distributed Software Objects, CORBA
• Distribued Information WWW
• Peer to Peer Napster and mates

14
What issues are there?

• Organisation
• Resource Management, Scheduling
• Optimisation
• Security
• Balancing load
• Handling errors

15
Linux Cluster
16
How do they do it?

• Split up problems, requires specific analysis for
  different problems though -/
• Architecture of a cluster, software
• Parallelising Compilers, why not do it
  automatically?

17
Distributed Systems

• Loose definition - collaborative computing
• Enables all applications in all areas, however
  mostly for large stuff
• Pushes back the frontiers of what we think were
  able to solve
• Better use of our scarce resources!