Europe Exceeds U.S. in Refining Grid Computing

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

I find this an interesting approach to lobbying. Why is it we have to 
always yell "they are going to beat us..." First the Japanese, then the ....

My own belief is grid computing may become significant when a number of 
serious research problems have been solved -- like security.  (by the way I 
believe we did one of the first "grid" computing systems at UC Irvine in 
1973 as part of the DCS project.)

The call for "flood us with money to help us beat the Europeans seems 
wrong". When we fund USA/European efforts we keep saying how they benefit 
US science. Will not the European efforts benefit US Science ?

Nasty

Dave



Europe Exceeds U.S. in Refining Grid Computing

November 10, 2003
 By JOHN MARKOFF and JENNIFER L. SCHENKER





When the Swiss-based pharmaceutical giant Novartis needed a
new supercomputer for designing drugs, the company found it
already had one. It was hidden in the unused computing
power the company had available in the thousands of PC's
that were already being used in its offices.

Novartis used American software technology to harness the
power of its office personal computers, but European and
American scientists and government officials said that
Europe was moving faster than the United States to
capitalize on the approach, which is called grid computing.


Grids lash individual computers together, tapping their
unused power to tackle complex computing chores beyond the
scope of isolated processors. They are being called upon by
scientists and corporations for a variety of applications,
including building low cost supercomputers and creating
work groups that can span cities or even the globe.

The shift underscores more than a new style of computing.
It also signals a new reality in the transfer of computer
technologies. The global Internet is accelerating the rate
at which new technologies can be deployed anywhere,
frequently shortening or even erasing the certainty of
American technological leadership.

"Europe has decided that this is a real competitive
advantage,'' said Peter A. Freeman, assistant director of
the National Science Foundation here for computer and
information science and engineering. "And they are going
after it."

Novartis used software by United Devices of Austin, Tex.,
to link 2,700 desktop personal computers to help create
drugs. This summer the company said that it had discovered
several promising new chemical molecules with its grid and
it planned to expand the system to its entire corporate
network of 70,000 personal computers.

Europe's rush to grids underscores cultural and political
differences between it and the United States, technologists
in each area say. While American universities and companies
often lead the innovation parade, the United States
sometimes becomes hamstrung in putting new technologies
into use by a proliferation of competing computing and
telecommunications standards and by government reluctance
to orchestrate industrial policies.

By contrast, European governments have traditionally been
more effective in deploying unified standards and
concentrating on technologies that appear to offer an
economic advantage. But that extra help can lead to big
mistakes, occasionally pushing technologies so far ahead of
the market that they never deliver a reasonable payoff.

Cellphone networks are an example of the difference.
Although the technology was invented in the United States,
the current European digital cellular networks are
generally acknowledged to offer superior service. But
Europe's telecom companies have wasted tens of billions of
dollars buying the rights to deliver third generation, or
3-G, cellphone services that have generated little
interest. With grid computing, Europe may have as much as
an 18-month lead in deploying the advances in practical
ways, European scientists and government officials said.

While the United States is beginning to respond to a report
in February from the National Science Foundation Advisory
Panel on Cyberinfrastructure urging coordinated investment
in grid technologies, the European Union is preparing to
start two major initiatives in early 2004.

One, called Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe, aims to
build the largest international grid infrastructure to
date, operating in more than 70 institutions throughout
Europe, providing 24-hour grid service and a computing
capacity comparable to 20,000 of today's most powerful
personal computers.

The other is a distributed supercomputing project, led by
France's National Center for Scientific Research, that will
connect seven supercomputers in Europe at optical network
speeds, getting a leg up on the TeraGrid project in the
United States, which aims to connect the nation's major
supercomputer sites.

"The goal is to establish Europe as one of the most dynamic
and creative environment in the world to deploy
grid-enabled infrastructures," said Mário Campolargo,
director for the research infrastructure unit at the
European Commission in Brussels.

The strategy appears to be leading toward accelerating the
deployment of commercial projects like the Novartis grid.

There are a "number of research-oriented organizations in
Europe that have made significant early progress," said
Andy Butler, a vice president for enterprise systems in the
London office of the Gartner Group, a technology research
firm. Europe's advances, he added, mean "vendors like
I.B.M., Sun and Hewlett-Packard have made a lot of their
early progress in Europe, as opposed to the U.S."

The Europeans also have the advantage of a clearer road map
than in the United States, where planning for computing and
networking infrastructure is scattered throughout the
federal government.

"The European Union has a 5- to 10-year strategic plan
finalized,'' said Larry Smarr, a grid computing pioneer who
runs an institute associated with the San Diego and Irvine
campuses of the University of California. "This is a slap
in the face and a wake-up call that things have gone
global.''

The Hewlett-Packard Company, for example, said last week
that it had joined BAE Systems, a British maker of
aerospace and defense systems; Cardiff University; the
University of Wales, Swansea; and the Institute of High
Performance Computing in Singapore to use grid computing
for advanced, collaborative simulation and visualization in
aerospace and defense design.

The project is being paid for in part by Britain's
Department of Trade and Industry and will try to solve
computer security problems when using a grid because
businesses like BAE need to control what information should
be protected from outsiders.

When it comes to grid projects "geared towards getting real
applications running, there are probably more in Europe,"
said Martin Walker, an executive at Hewlett-Packard
involved in technical computing for Europe, the Middle East
and Africa.

The British government is helping to lead that drive: It is
supporting a variety of projects, including the Diagnostic
Mammography National Database project, which received
matching funds from I.B.M. and aims to use grid computing
to create a new model for scanning, storing and analyzing
mammograms.

"The nice thing about'' the project "is that it is linked
to the government's e-science program, not just a random
collection of work," said Brian Carpenter, an engineer in
the storage and networking section of the I.B.M. Systems
Group. The link with the government means "there is a very
good chance that it will be integrated into the national
health care system," he said.

The British government alone will spend $335 million on
grid computing from 2000 to 2005, said John M. Taylor,
director general of research councils in the Britain's
Office of Science and Technology and a former director of
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Bristol, the European arm of
the company's long-range research laboratories.

"The technology is mostly still coming from the U.S.," said
Ian Foster, associate division director for the distributed
systems lab at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill.
"What is happening now - which is either good or worrisome,
depending on your perspective - is that there is a
tremendous amount of investment in the European Union."

Beyond money from individual governments, the European
Union is expected to spend $428 million from 2002 through
2006 to upgrade the grid's infrastructure. Unlike in the
United States, all the projects have fixed objectives and
private sector partners.

Grid backers argue that lagging American planning and
financial support is an issue in part because of evidence
that the creation of computing grids will have a direct
economic impact. Last month, a study released by the Rural
Internet Access Authority, a North Carolina economic
development group with industry backing, estimated that
deployment of an advanced computing grid in the state would
add more than $10 billion and 24,000 jobs through 2010.

The United States is ahead on one front: it has made the
most progress in the deployment of computing grids for
scientific applications like studying earthquake risks.
Next year, the TeraGrid project is expected to offer
computing speeds of up to 20 trillion mathematical
operations a second and the ability to store a petabyte of
information - about what could be saved on 25,000 standard
personal computer hard drives.

Europe's equivalent effort, Openlab, involving I.B.M. and a
research center in Switzerland for the Geneva-based
European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its
French acronym, CERN, is not expected to reach the same
level until 2005.

But the Europeans are racing ahead in developing faster
optical networks. A CERN-Caltech team set an Internet 2
Land Speed Record recently by transferring 1.1 trillion
bytes of data in less than 30 minutes.

Such transfer speeds were "not even thinkable a year ago,"
said Flavia Donno, the computer scientist in charge of
physics experiments on the grid for CERN.

Now the Europeans are ready to move to 40 gigabits a
second, relying in part on what is known as dark fiber,
unused high speed fiber optic infrastructure. The test beds
will allow scientists and businesses to share information
and computer infrastructure in real time.

The work being done in Europe is much more concentrated on
building something that is ready for end-users than are the
grid projects in the United States, said Dr. Donno, who
worked with American scientists to build the first
interoperable grid between Europe and the United States.
With Europe ahead in getting large applications running,
American scientists have asked for a role in the Enabling
Grids for E-science in Europe project. But because European
research and development programs do not normally provide
financial support for American participation, the Europeans
are asking the National Science Foundation to contribute to
the project. Mr. Freeman, the foundation official, met
recently with European Commission officials on the issue.

"I hope they will find an agreement that is a good balance
between national competitiveness and international
cooperation," said Fabrizio Gagliardi, project leader of
the European DataGrid middleware project. There is "so much
to be gained if we join forces,'' he said. "We need a
worldwide infrastructure so that we can really work to
solve basic problems like the energy crisis and sustainable
development."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/technology/10grid.html?ex=1069472931&ei=1&en=b60ea1e1f36fb6ae

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