Oracle-L: RE: Grid news

From: Pete Sharman <peter.sharman_at_oracle.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 15:35:13 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.005D6990.20031113153513@fatcity.com>

Nope, sorry. This is a fundamental misconception that many people share. :)

SETI is a completely different kettle of fish to Oracle's grid story, using spare cycles on desktops to try and achieve something as part of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (IIRC that's what SETI stands for, anyway). It's basically a way of breaking up massively parallel problems. Likewise, most scientific applications of grid architecture are designed to solve big batch problems.

Oracle's enterprise grid architecture bears almost no resemblance to this at all. It's all about virtualization and provisioning to improve resource utilization. The provisioning technologies are really the key to unlocking the benefits of the grid (dang that sounds like Marketing crap!) where you can provision CPU and data dynamically within and across nodes and databases. Have a look for the paper Brajesh Goyal did at OracleWorld for all the details.

Pete

"Controlling developers is like herding cats." Kevin Loney, Oracle DBA Handbook

"Oh no, it's not. It's much harder than that!" Bruce Pihlamae, long term Oracle DBA.

-----Original Message-----
Nelson Flores
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 8:59 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

It's kind of like the SETI project... for those of you that don't know what this is, it's a project where NASA has images that need to be analyzed, but don't have the computing power to do it all in a reasonable time. So they created a system where they distribute the processing of the images over n workstations, each running a separate part of the process.
The main problem with this (which I noticed at my university where every single unix workstation had the SETI app running), was the fact that it slowed the machine down (they didn't use the nice command to only use idle time).

The question related to all these Grid apps is how they are going to distribute the priorities for the jobs being done. If a general manager needs something ASAP, then do all we lesser mortals have to suffer?

Oh well ... food for thought.

-----Original Message-----
DENNIS WILLIAMS
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 8:50 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Oracle has announced 10 will be "10g for grid". Many of us have been baffled by what grid is, will it be useful in the real world, etc. Here is a short article on a practical grid application (non Oracle) http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5106230.html

Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com
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Author: DENNIS WILLIAMS
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Author: Nelson Flores
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Author: Pete Sharman
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