Information power grid: The new frontier in parallel computing?

ASA’s Information Power Grid is an example of an emerging, exciting concept that can potentially make high-performance computing power accessible to general users as easily and seamlessly as electricity from an electrical power grid. In the IPG system, high-performance computers located at geographically distributed sites will be connected via a high-speed interconnection network. Users will be able to submit computational jobs at any site, and the system will seek the best available computational resources, transfer the user’s input data sets to that system, access other needed data sets from remote sites, perform the specified computations and analysis, and then return the resulting data sets to the user. Systems such as the IPG will be able to support larger applications than ever before. New types of applications will also be enabled, such as multidisciplinary collaboration environments that couple geographically dispersed compute, data, scientific instruments, and people resources together using a suite of grid-wide services. IPG’s fundamental technology comes from current research results in the area of large-scale computational grids. Figure 1 provides an intuitive view of a wide-area computational grid.