Grid System Eliminates Need to Buy Software - Purdue University Network Computing Hubs - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), June, 2001

A system at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., could help create a worldwide "computational grid" in which individual users no longer have to purchase software, but are able to run programs remotely over the Internet. The Purdue University Network Computing Hubs (PUNCH) is a network computer that provides access to various programs from 16 universities, four research centers, and six companies.

The system is primarily used by engineers who require highly specialized software for research and teaching. The software is not commercially available and is difficult to use and install. PUNCH not only makes the software accessible to the entire research community, it automatically enables computer users to run the software via their own computers through the World Wide Web.

"The software does not actually run on the users' computers, it runs on a server somewhere," explains Nirav Kapadia, a senior research scientist responsible for developing the underlying software that makes PUNCH possible. "It enables whatever you are running on your server to interface with a distant computer." Although PUNCH currently is dominated by engineering applications, in principle it could be used for a much broader range of software, including programs used for business and industry. Companies with offices in different states or countries would benefit from using such a hub to share expensive software.

An important feature of the system is that it can automatically find resources, anywhere in the nation, that users need to do their work. "If you are running a high-level simulation and it requires a super computer, it can look around for a super computer that isn't being used at the time, or one that is being least used, and send the job there," notes Mark Lundstrom, professor of electrical and computer engineering. "If you run a smaller job, it can recognize that it can go to a smaller machine somewhere else. It can manage all of this, like the electric power grid. Your electricity comes from someplace where there is excess capacity, and it is routed across the country. In the same way, there are a lot of excess computing cycles that just aren't used that could be used somewhere else."

PUNCH contains various "hubs" for different engineering interests, and each hub connects users to the programs they need for their work. For example, Purdue engineers have created a nanotechnology simulation hub--or nanoHub--which provides programs for designing extremely small transistors and other components measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter.