Grid computing takes flight

Piyush Mehrotra isn't exaggerating when he says the data collected and maintained by his organization's computing systems spans the universe.

In fact, data collected by instruments in space might overload even the most advanced computing systems at NASA if the organization didn't use grid. Mehrotra, senior scientist and lead on the grid integrated project team at NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division, part of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., says grid computing gives his team a cost-effective means to store and maintain volumes of data used in projects examining the Earth, solar system and universe.

Grid computing pools processing cycles from multiple computers to maximize capacity, memory, power and other resources distributed across multiple systems. The concept of a grid describes a framework in which heterogeneous and distributed computational, networking, memory and storage resources can be linked to serve the needs of particular user applications, according to Nemertes Research.

Mehrotra says NASA started on its own with grid in 1996 and in 1997 began working with the Globus Alliance and its Globus Toolkit, an open source implementation for building grid-enabled applications. Grid proponents say the technology lets IT squeeze more out of their servers, storage and systems.

NASA initially deployed grid computing to share resources between locations, but now plans to use the technology to support critical projects and space missions. "Our original goal for investigating grid computing was to make more efficient use of NASA's computational resources and to allow scientists and engineers easier access to these resources," Mehrotra says. "[Now] we are investigating the use of these technologies for mission operations; both for mission and payload control and management."

Gaining momentum

Once primarily a tool for leading-edge research engineers, grid is becoming more mainstream for enterprise IT departments in aerospace companies in particular. Bob Parker, industry analyst at AMR Research, says aerospace firms use grid more than other sectors because of the nature of their work. "Designing an aircraft carrier requires a lot of computing cycles, for example, so you will see these companies making a concerted effort with grid computing around a certain task," Parker says.

According to Insight Research, total worldwide grid spending will increase from $250 million in 2003 to approximately $4.9 billion in 2008. It forecasts enterprise grid deployment to shift from early adoption to more widespread pilots and production launches this year.

A grid computing system manages two supercomputers at NASA's Metacenter. The Metacenter is an exploratory project that aims to make NASA supercomputers more readily available to researchers, thus providing quicker turn-around for batch jobs, a larger range of available resources for computation and better distribution of the computational workload across multiple supercomputers. Grid computing lets jobs be migrated between the systems based on load and by using a scheduling system called Portable Batch Systems.

"We are a research and development center as well as a provider of services to NASA, so we tend to get involved in promising technologies early or create them ourselves," Mehrotra says. "Before grid computing, NASA's resources were isolated from each other or clustered in small groups. This makes it difficult for users to use resources at multiple sites."