Thanks to the help Sun Grid Engine(SGE) now I can have a good time with my girl friend while having several jobs running in parallel in PICB's mini-cluster. The concept of grid computing seemed extremely difficult to me as I first got in touch of this in Oracle's advertisement. However, the usage of SGE is really simple to the end users like me. As I just have to learn to use the simple command like qsub, which specifies which program to submit to the grid engine, and qdel, which tells the engine to kill a thread. The operations are so simple and the output file are directly stored in my home folder, where I can take a look the next day.
This reminds me of the articles I read about cloud computing in Business Week a couple of month ago. Which seemed too far away at the very beginning. In could computing, as the media say, the user just need to enter the jobs in remote terminal, and the results will come. It is super stable, super scalable, super cost-effective, and even super environment-friendly, as the computing center may have some optimized cooling system.
However, I am still concerned whether the cloud will assign my jobs, which are mostly computation intensive, to the a few of its fasted CPUs, or just randomly throw it to one of its nodes. Maybe this will not be known by the cloud until the program gets started. An alternative solution is to specify the number of threads manually, which is obviously not what we want to see.
This may partly make Linux system even stronger, because Linux, which is free, seems an idea operating system for this kind of multi-node task, and the system is growing rapidly, with the help of GNU GPL.
And finally, this kind of computing service will surely find its way into family entertainment and personal computing areas. But I guess individual families are unlikely to contact directly with computing service vendors. But maybe some the-Comcast-of-tomorrow company will surely do this, giving out a new kind of uniform OS, which I hope will be open source.
But to have individuals using this kind of service, we need either (1) they have weak computers or (2) their programs are too challenging. While the first condition seems very unlikely in countries like United States, it may be possible to do this in developing countries, who may outsource the could computing to industry giants like IBM. Then these country just need to develop their OLPC and build good internet connection. The second is even simpler. Just think between the age of 10 and 25, how many of your friends' computer upgrades are caused by Blizzard.
