grid.org

» see grid.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

distributed computing reached my generation of engineering students through seti@home, which everybody in a computer engineering department had at least heard about. the pitch was clean enough to explain in one sentence to somebody who did not care about computers. your machine is idle most of the day, so lend the idle part to a problem too big for one machine.

grid.org was the same idea aimed at something less romantic than alien radio. united devices, a company in austin, opened it in april 2001 and its main tenant was a cancer research project run with the university of oxford's chemistry department and the national foundation for cancer research. you downloaded a client, it pulled a batch of work, and your unused cycles screened candidate molecules against proteins known to matter in cancer. intel put its name and its money behind the recruitment drive.

the scale it reached was real. the cancer project pulled in something like a million and a half computers inside a year, with roughly 150,000 registered users in the united states and 170,000 across europe. phase one worked through billions of drug-like molecules against a dozen protein targets. no laboratory on earth was going to run that by hand, and in 2001 the cloud you would rent to do it did not exist yet.

i cannot tell you the cancer client was ever installed on my machine, and i am not going to invent that. what i can tell you is that the deal it asked for was awkward where i lived. the work needed the computer awake rather than the line connected, which in a turkish house in 2002 meant leaving a desktop running all night against an electricity bill that people actually thought about.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually computed ~

the projects went well past cancer. in january 2002 an anthrax screening run went up in the weeks after the letter attacks in the united states and burned through its molecule list in under a month. a smallpox research grid followed with the american defense department attached to it, and later came human proteome folding, a protein structure prediction run shared with ibm's world community grid.

the design was ordinary and that was the point. a server cut the problem into small independent pieces and a client pulled one piece at a time, returning an answer when it had one. handing the same piece to different volunteers caught the machines that lied or miscalculated. every volunteer computing project since has run some version of that loop.

~ the day it stopped ~

on 27 april 2007 the volunteer projects were switched off. united devices had spent years moving toward selling grid software to companies with their own data centers, which was the actual business, and a public science project staffed by donated cycles was not part of it. the community was told to move to world community grid, and a lot of it did.

the domain went on having a life without the point. univa relaunched grid.org in november 2007 as an open-source community site, then folded it into unicluster.org around 2010, and by 2012 it was pointing at a corporate homepage. the name outlived the thing by five years while meaning nothing.

~ the inheritance ~

what died here was a specific bargain between science and the public. for a few years there was a way for someone with no training to contribute something measurable to research, and the contribution was a computer sitting in a corner of the room. it gave people a work-unit count to watch and a team to join at their office. it gave the projects a workforce nobody could have afforded otherwise.

gpus and rented cloud capacity took the argument away. by the middle of the 2010s the sensible way to run that kind of screening was to pay for a few hundred machine-hours and have the answer that afternoon. the volunteers were never really about the throughput anyway, and that was the part nobody replaced.

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