2010

managed to get through the whole of 2009 without posting anything here. will see if 2010 is going to be any different. no longer really doing Grid computing in a SupercomputingCentre anymore, but, most other things are quite similar, and still looking into the "Web for Robots". hopefully more on this later on.

REST and the iPod

Something occurred to me a while back, which I choose not to mention, essentially because if I had it badly wrong, I would embarrass myself. But, I googled a bit, and didn't find the analogy made elsewhere, so I don't have confirmation from the REST experts.

I have 2nd generation iPod nano (not that the version matters), and as I navigate around the interface, I see something which in lots of places seem to be RESTful design. Firstly it seems to have a uniform interface. Furthermore, as I go through 'music->artists->elvis', etc ... I am navigating links. This is "connectedness" as described in RESTful Web Services. Actually, I would like to see more from the Pod in this direction - for example, for the song I am currently listening to, it would be nice to see how this is linked into which playlist, genre, etc. This would be going in the linked data direction. Furthermore, I believe I see a very nice example of the mysterious hypermedia as the engine of application state, in, for example, the stopwatch function of the ipod.

Hopefully, I am not too far off with this analogy. I find a lot of inspiration for the design of the Grid as a Web application from my MP3 player - i.e. I find it quite useful to think in terms of "how this would be done on the ipod", when thinking about REST.

(?)

Uniform Interface to Computing Resources

uniform addressability (everything has its own HTTP URI)
uniform operations (the constrained interface ala REST)
uniform mediatype (RDF)

add the three above together, and what you get in Grid-land is the answer

Uniform Interface to Computing Resources

#9 Dream

so, on one hand, something like amazons EC2 can be regarded as a kind of 'on-demand' super-computer. I can then collect this 'cloud' resource with a number of other 'normal' (super)computer resources and build a Grid. i.e. Grid contains Cloud.

but, the EC2 infrastructure itself can probably be regarded as somekind of Grid - as I'm sure it is pretty distributed and does a lot of Grid-like stuff. Cloud contains Grid. Staying with the Grid as I think I understand it today, is a Super-cloud a façade enveloping a Grid of distributed (super)computers ? My super-cloud wrapping all my distributed resources including EC2 ones. Cloud contains Grid contains Cloud. umm ...

Cloud 9

Everyone is talking about Clouds, and in the Grid community we are kind of looking at the best way to jump on the bandwagon, or integrate somehow. Although kind of vague, it seems that with Cloud computing we are somewhat closer to the original Grid vision than todays reality 'on the ground'.

... what's probably got you baffled more is what this thing here is for.

Kick off !

Welcome !

Tim Berners-Lee's initial motiviation for getting the World Wide Web going was to help scientists to collaborate and share information. Initially the Grid targetted scientists, giving them coordinated resource sharing, at a Global scale. Seems that there is some shared purpose here. However, Grid computing is currently operating in a somewhat different sphere. The Web is the natural environment for this stuff - Web computing not Grid computing.

The Grid is a Web application.