In 2004, the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation launched a unique project: a powerful grid computing platform available not only to the government and large corporations and universities but to anyone at all.

Now, in 2008, the Global Grid Exchange is still unique.

The foundation touts the G2EX as the nation’s largest open public grid network.

“No other federal, state or local institution in the U.S. has put together anything of this magnitude,” according to Global Grid Exchange Program Manager Matthew Loss.

A Virtual Supercomputer

Grid computing — aggregating the spare computing power of PCs and mainframes over the Internet to make virtual supercomputers — promises to turbocharge humanity’s capabilities. It’s a way of tackling really, really large problems, Loss said.

Finding patterns in massive medical datasets, simulating climate and detecting new planets — these types of problems can be solved only very slowly if at all with an individual computer. But a grid can solve them in a reasonable time frame.

Grid computing, also called distributed computing, became popularized through SETI@home, launched in 1999.

By installing downloadable SETI@home software, interested computer users were able to volunteer spare computing power over the Internet to analyze chunks of radio astronomy data for the University of California at Berkeley’s Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

More than 5 million participants in 250 countries, territories and colonies now donate computing time toward that single effort. Hundreds of thousands of participating computers are online at a given time, according to SETI statistics.

The G2EX Measured

The G2EX is not yet quite that big. Currently, its network ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 nodes online at any given time.

Its capacity can be measured in compute-years.

“If you used one single computer all day every day for a year, that would be a compute-year,” Loss explained. After doing a quick calculation based on the minimum 2,500 nodes on the grid at any one time, he said, “We could do at least 48 compute-years a week.”

Most of the computer time donated on the G2EX comes from West Virginia University and Fairmont State University, according to Loss, although the size of participants ranges down to the individual computer user.

Fast, Surprisingly Inexpensive

Anyone can buy computing time on the G2EX.

“On the Web site, you can register for a free 30-day test drive, and it actually walks you through it,” Loss said.

The G2EX support desk e-mails instructions for downloading the Frontier Compute Engine software that powers the grid. Frontier is a Java platform that is familiar for the types of researchers who typically use the grid, Loss said.

For others, there’s an e-mail support line.

It must be expensive, right?

Not necessarily — especially if time savings are taken into account.

Loss gave an example of a computing job that would take 83 days to run on a single average desktop computer.

On a 32-node computer cluster, the job would be quite a bit faster: two and a half days, he said. Those systems aren’t typically rented out, though — they’re owned by the users. It would cost about $40,000 to buy, plus an IT staff to maintain it.

Yet the same job, run on 500 nodes on the G2EX, would take just four hours.

The cost: $300.

One of the WVHTC Foundation’s own projects illustrates the speed of the G2EX on a real-life example.

In the foundation’s Locksmith Decryption project, researchers are working with the U.S. Department of Justice to crack encrypted files on confiscated computers.

Loss described a password decryption demonstration his office performed on the grid last fall.

“We used 1,000 computers in that demonstration, and it took us 15 minutes to crack a password,” he said. “If we’d used one computer, it would have taken over 100 days.”

Economic Development

The G2EX could contribute to economic development in West Virginia, Loss said.

“It’s definitely an economic stimulus tool,” he said. “We want to stimulate research and help researchers get started. Without access to a supercomputer or grid, it may be hard to get some research off the ground.”

During the past year, users from 30 organizations have run more than 3,000 jobs on the grid. And use is trending upward, from that average of 250 jobs a month to more than 300 each month now.

Yet those projects use only 10 to 15 compute-years a week of the G2EX’s minimum 48-compute-year capacity, Loss said.

That leaves a lot of capacity for projects that could range from designing milk cartons that are cheaper and easier to produce to designing better satellites, he said.

Growing capacity is a simple matter of recruiting more people to donate their spare computing time.

As participation on the grid grows, Loss said, use for researchers could be provided for free.

Getting Students Involved

As one way of making sure that academics across the state are aware of the grid as a resource, the WVHTC Foundation established in the fall semester of 2006 a biannual G2EX competition for West Virginia college students.

Participants are challenged to write grid-based computer applications that leverage the computational power of the Global Grid Exchange.

In the most recent event, a top prize of $1,000 was awarded in January 2008 to Davis and Elkins College students Danielle Anderson, Makesi Bostic, Jay Matthews and Kevin Thurston. The D&E team attempted to disprove the Goldbach’s Conjecture, that every even number is the sum of two prime numbers.

A $500 second-place prize was awarded to West Virginia University student Doppalapudi Raghu Chaitanya for calculating the billionth digit of the mathematical constant pi.

“This competition provides students throughout the state the opportunity to conduct research-based projects utilizing one of the newest trends in the computing industry,” said WVHTC Foundation President and CEO James Estep.

Still Unique

The G2EX claims to be unique in that it is available to any user — a claim supported by GRIDtoday Editor Derrick Harris.

“I’m not aware of any other current grid projects where members of the community donate their resources, and the aggregated CPU power can be used for general-purpose business or research activities,” Harris wrote in an e-mail.

Eventually, Loss expects the grid might be able to pay some small amount to those who donate computer time or allow them to accumulate credits toward use of the grid.