Information power grid: The new frontier in parallel computing?

NASA's Information Power Grid is an example of an emerging, exciting concept that can potentially make high-performance computing power accessible to general users as easily and seamlessly as electricity from an electrical power grid. In the TPC; system, high-performance computers located at geographically distributed sites will be connected over a high-speed interconnection network. Users will be able to submit computational jobs at any site, and the system will seek the best available computational resources, transfer the user's input data sets to that system, access other needed data sets from remote sites, perform the specified computations and analysis, and then return the resulting data sets to the user. Systems such as the IPG will he able to support larger applications than ever before. Recently, a panel discussion was engaged at IPPS/SPDP '99 to discuss the technical challenges of computational grids and the research underway to solve these challenges. This report summarizes that discussion.