1. TeraGrid n US based, funded by the NSF n High speed network, combines clusters into one Super-Cluster! n Doesn’t just combine computation… combines storage, sensors, visualisation, all computing resources! n Enables better science

2. TeraGrid as a Distributed System n Computing resources at different sites n TeraGrid to be used as a single system n Systems built from individual nodes

3. Not the only Grid… n Many grids worldwide n Examples: EUGrid, I-Grid n Individual clusters & supercomputers in various places, commercial and academic

4. What can we use Grids for? n Hard & heavy research n 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! n 117 Sun SparcStations n Render farm, a load of machines rendering different frames of video n 114,000 frames, 77 minute movie n One computer would have taken 43 years of nonstop computing

7. Parallel Video Encoding n MPEG

8. Immersive Environments n Video Walls! Visualisation stuff

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

10. Search engines n Google, pigeon rank n Searching wide database, ideal for deployment on a cluster n *was* driven by 4500 node Linux Cluster

11. Breaking Security - Computing n RC5, DES, & distributed.net n 2^64 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) keys n Teams, donated CPU cycles

12. Other “proper” research n Molecular modelling, drug design n Study of viruses, virus propagation n AIDS/Cancer research n Weather forecasting, climate prediction n High Energy Physics n Simulation, earth, economics, financial n Artificial Intelligence

13. Other stuff in Distributed Systems n Distributed Software Objects, CORBA n Distribued Information = WWW n Peer to Peer – Napster and mates

14. What issues are there? n Organisation n Resource Management, Scheduling n Optimisation n Security n Balancing load n Handling errors

15. Linux Cluster

16. How do they do it? n Split up problems, requires specific analysis for different problems though :-/ n Architecture of a cluster, software n Parallelising Compilers, why not do it automatically?

17. Distributed Systems n Loose definition - collaborative computing n Enables all applications in all areas, however mostly for large stuff n Pushes back the frontiers of what we think we’re able to solve n Better use of our scarce resources!