Software to unlock the power of grids

A huge amount of computing power sits idle most of the time, and new technologies enabling the sharing of resources aim to capitalise on that. Now European researchers have developed software to simultaneously run applications on very different IT infrastructures.

Unlocking the power of grid computing has become one of the top priorities in the IT world. Optimising the use of existing resources rather than deploying new infrastructure is becoming increasingly important in the current economic climate.

At the same time, applications are taking longer to execute using traditional computing methods, with the amount of data being processed increasing at a rapid pace. This presents a problem because processing power is not keeping up with demand.

Moore’s Law predicted that the processing power of integrated circuits, or chips, would roughly double every 18 months. This has held true from the late 1950s until recently – the exponential growth has finally slowed down as the miniaturisation of components is nearing its limit.

An EU-funded project, GridCOMP, has been working around this conundrum by developing some clever software and middleware which allows applications to run on several, or even many, computers at the same time regardless of different infrastructures and architectures.

Full article : http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90738