Can grid computing save the world? The mere fact that grid computing exists will not be sufficient in itself. However, Choo Jun Tan, founder of the java.net Mobile Desktop Grid (MDG) project, believes that harnessing available global clustered computing resources, so that they can be effectively utilized by researchers and engineers, is a major step in the right direction.
The MDG project provides a way for institutions that have clustered computers to make those resources available to researchers around the world, and a way for those researchers to find and utilize the available clustered systems. The objective is to assist researchers who are working with computationally-intensive software, for example biological modeling of diseases, in finding solutions to global problems more quickly, through shared global computing resources.
The Mobile Desktop Grid User and Developer Guide (PDF) is a 51-page document that covers MDG Version 1.1.2.2. The guide was written by Tan Choo Jun and Ang Wai Heng. The MDG team works from Universiti Sains Malasia. The team won a Sun Technology award at OpenJive 2009 in Singapore for its work on the MDG project.
The MDG user and developer guide documents the steps for utilizing the software, including registering a new account, adding a new cluster, finding MDG solutions resources, submitting jobs, etc.
The MDG software (both server and client) has been deployed on Open Solaris, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Microsoft Windows XP. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL v. 3.0).
If your institution has clustered computing resources that could be shared with global researchers, or if you are a researcher seeking clustered resources, or if you might want to assist the MDG team in developing and enhancing the Mobile Desktop Grid software, visit the MDG project site.
In Java Today, James Gosling is noticing a lot of Plaid recently:
I've been watching the Olympics and seeing a lot of American athletes in their trendy plaid shirts. It keeps reminding me of a grad school story... When I was a grad student at CMU, the students union brought in the science fiction author Harlan Ellison to give a talk one evening. He was arriving the evening before, so the CS department convinced him to come over to visit during the day. A bunch of us then spent a great day with him showing off all the cool non-fiction that we were working on. He was really engaged, sharp, and interesting...
Catching up on writing about more numerical work from years past, the second article in a two-part series finished last year discusses some low-level floating-point manipulations methods I added to the platform over the course of JDKs 5 and 6. Previously, I published a
blog entry reacting to the
first part of the series. JDK 6 enjoyed several numerics-related library changes. Constants for MIN_NORMAL, MIN_EXPONENT, and MAX_EXPONENT were added...
In case you missed the big event last week, I have finished post-processing and uploading the video. We took the quality up a notch by getting a direct screen capture from the presenter laptop. This means that you will not only get crystal clear slides, but also full-screen demos and a nice tight head-shot of the presenter. This moves our video setup firmly up from a Level 4 to a premium Level 1 operation...
After realizing that Ant and the software factory I had built on top of it had become unfit for managing my cluster of projects, about six months ago I decided to switch to Maven. I knew I was going to open a can of worms, as there are fundamental differences between the two systems, I was abandoning a tool that I was proficient with and moving to another that I didn't know at all; this was going to be applied to a dozen of projects, hundreds of modules and thousands of classes. In the meantime, I also had to substantially optimize my software factory because of test runs taking too long (thus breaking the meaning of continuous integration)...
What it means to speak German fluently and to be able of C++: Several years ago one of our key coders moved from the south of Germany (where our HQ is located at the Black Forest) to the cold and rainy north, so we had to to find a suitable substitute. After screening lots of applications, we picked few to invite for an interview. It declared the candidate's ability to speak German and C++. So she was the first one getting invited into our office rooms to fight her thesis of what she declaratively would be able of...
One of the big features in Java EE 6 is dependency injection(yeah, 330 & 299 stuff!!). It pretty much integrated with the every EE component. That means you can nicely use all the CDI features with JAX-WS web services. Let us see a simple shopping cart web service that uses CDI...
In the Metro and JAXB forum, jshowalter has a problem where a Long classpath blows up wsgen on Windows: We are running wsgen in development, and recently added more JARs to our classpath, and the command wound up being too long for Windows. Without giving us grief about using Windows (which believe me isn't our first choice), can someone help us get out of...
In the Bluu-ray Disk Java forum, hooligancat is working an issue involving Event timing: We are still having problems getting graphics to synch with the video correctly. Can I ask what events people have found to be the most reliable. We are trying to avoid the graphics showing before the video has loaded. For instance: Video...
Our current Spotlight is the Mobile Desktop Grid (MDG) project: Mobile Desktop Grid (MDG) is a one-stop solution for obtaining worldwide grid resources for computational use. With the MDG solution, world wide physicists, biologists, chemists, laboratory assistants, and computer scientists are able to complete exhaustive computational jobs in a shorter period. The MDG solution aids researchers addressing global issues. Even users who do not have a lot of knowledge about grid and clustered computing can utilize cluster resources with the MDG solution. For more information about the MDG project, download the Mobile Desktop Grid User and Developer Guide.
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