[Beowulf] massive parallel processing application required

[Mitchell Wisidagamage]

> 
> Please don't fall into the trap of thinking "e-Science" requires a tie 
> to the Globus Toolkit to be valid.
> 
I do not think this (anymore). I queried Matthew Haynos from IBM who's 
an expert in this area some time ago as I'm new to grid computing. The 
silly questions are from me :o) Answers are his.

Because at the moment distributed computing is only popular in the
academic research and highly specialized part of the industry...atleast
that's what I think. Any professional and personal comments from your
expereince?

Not true.  Distributed computing is more and more mainstream.  I think 
too that you are looking at distributed computing perhaps too narowly. 
Even if you are referring to supercomputing, witness that more and more 
of the Top 500 supercomputing sites are increasingly commerical (as 
opposed to academic or public institutions).

Anyhow I just read it again and you stated that "Grid computing becoming
more of a defacto standard for distributed computing in enterprises".

May I ask why do you think that?
I would say b/c of the growing ubiquity of scale-out computing (lots of 
machines, lots of resources, etc.)  What's happening here is that 
scheduling, etc. is going from the machine into the network.  People no 
longer know where things are going to run with hundreds / thousands of 
blade processors.  This is a sea change.  People use to say run this 
piece of work on this machine, now it's just run this work, I have no 
idea where.  I've written an article series for IBM's grid site on 
developerWorks:

Check out: 
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/search/searchResults.jsp?searchType=1&pageLang=&displaySearchScope=dW&searchSite=dW&lastUserQuery1=perspectives+on+grid&lastUserQuery2=&lastUserQuery3=&lastUserQuery4=&query=perspectives+on+grid+haynos&searchScope=dW

particularly the "Next-generation distributed computing" article for a 
primer.  I think you'll find the five or so articles in the series 
interesting.