Lifehouse actually beginning to happen

["Brian Cady" <cadyb@home.com>]

Thanks to MacDaddy at alt.music.who for pointing this out

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42230,00.html

The Grid: The Next-Gen Internet?
by Douglas Heingartner
2:00 a.m. March 8, 2001 PST           
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- The Matrix may be the future of virtual reality,
but researchers say the Grid is the future of collaborative problem-solving.

More than 400 scientists gathered at the Global Grid Forum this week to
discuss what may be the Internet's next evolutionary step.

Though distributed computing evokes associations with populist initiatives
like SETI@home, where individuals donate their spare computing power to
worthy projects, the Grid will link PCs to each other and the scientific
community like never before.

The Grid will not only enable sharing of documents and MP3 files, but also
connect PCs with sensors, telescopes and tidal-wave simulators.

IBM's Brian Carpenter suggested "computing will become a utility just like
any other utility."

Carpenter said, "The Grid will open up ... storage and transaction power in
the same way that the Web opened up content." And just as the Internet
connects various public and private networks, Cisco Systems' Bob Aiken said,
"you're going to have multiple grids, multiple sets of middleware that
people are going to choose from to satisfy their applications."

As conference moderator Walter Hoogland suggested, "The World Wide Web gave
us a taste, but the Grid gives a vision of an ICT (Information and
Communication Technology)-enabled world."

Though the task of standardizing everything from system templates to the
definitions of various resources is a mammoth one, the GGF can look to the
early days of the Web for guidance. The Grid that organizers are building is
a new kind of Internet, only this time with the creators having a better
knowledge of where the bottlenecks and teething problems will be.

The general consensus at the event was that although technical issues
abound, the thorniest issues will involve social and political dimensions,
for example how to facilitate sharing between strangers where there is no
history of trust.

Amsterdam seemed a logical choice for the first Global Grid Forum because
not only is it the world's most densely cabled city, it was also home to the
Internet Engineering Task Force's first international gathering in 1993. The
IETF has served as a model for many of the GGF's activities: protocols,
policy issues, and exchanging experiences.

The Grid Forum, a U.S.-based organization combined with eGrid - the European
Grid Forum, and Asian counterparts to create the Global Grid Forum (GGF) in
November, 2000.

The Global Grid Forum organizers said grid communities in the United States
and Europe will now run in synch.

The Grid evolved from the early desire to connect supercomputers into
"metacomputers" that could be remotely controlled. The word "grid" was
borrowed from the electricity grid, to imply that any compatible device
could be plugged in anywhere on the Grid and be guaranteed a certain level
of resources, regardless of where those resources might come from.

Scientific communities at the conference discussed what the compatibility
standards should be, and how extensive the protocols need to be.

As the number of connected devices runs from the thousands into the
millions, the policy issues become exponentially more complex. So far, only
draft consensus has been reached on most topics, but participants say these
are the early days.

As with the Web, the initial impetus for a grid came from the scientific
community, specifically high-energy physics, which needed extra resources to
manage and analyze the huge amounts of data being collected.

The most nettlesome issues for industry are security and accounting. But
unlike the Web, which had security measures tacked on as an afterthought,
the Grid is being designed from the ground up as a secure system.

C onference participants debated what types of services (known in
distributed computing circles as resource units) provided through the Grid
will be charged for. And how will the administrative authority be
centralized?

Corporations have been slow to cotton to this new technology's potential,
but the suits are in evidence at this year's Grid event. As GGF chairman
Charlie Catlett noted, "This is the first time I've seen this many ties at a
Grid forum."

In addition to IBM, firms such as Boeing, Philips and Unilever are already
taking baby steps toward the Grid.

Though commercial needs tend to be more transaction-focused than those of
scientific pursuits, most of the technical requirements are common.
Furthermore, both science and industry participants say they require a level
of reliability that's not offered by current peer-to-peer initiatives:
Downloading from Napster, for example, can take seconds or minutes, or might
not work at all.

Garnering commercial interest is critical to the Grid's future. Cisco's
Aiken explained that "if grids are really going to take off and become the
major impetus for the next level of evolution in the Internet, we have to
have something that allows (them) to easily transfer to industry."

Other potential Grid components include creating a virtual observatory, and
doctors performing simulations of blood flows. While some of these
applications have existed for years, the Grid will make them routine rather
than exceptional.

The California Institute of Technology's Paul Messina said that by sharing
computing resources, "you get more science from the same investment."

Ian Foster of the University of Chicago said that Web precursor Arpanet was
initially intended to be a distributed computing network that would share
CPU-intensive tasks but instead wound up giving birth to e-mail and FTP.

The Grid may give birth to a global file-swapping network or a members-only
citadel for moneyed institutions. But just as no one ten years ago would
have conceived of Napster -- not to mention AmIHotOrNot.com -- the future of
the Grid is unknown.

An associated DataGrid conference continues until Friday, focusing on a
project in which resources from Pan-European research institutions will
analyze data generated by a new particle collider being built at Swiss
particle-physics lab CERN

        -Brian in Atlanta
         The Who This Month!
        http://members.home.net/cadyb/who.htm