NETHERLANDS CITY COMBINES FTTP NETWORK, GRID COMPUTING

A suburb of Amsterdam in the Netherlands is embarking on a unique combination of municipal fiber-to-the-premises deployment and distributed computing that will harness the combined computing power of business and residential subscribers for research calculations. Project leaders are calling it the world's first supercomputer city.

So far, a few hundred businesses and fewer than 2000 homes are connected to the pilot municipal FTTP network in Almere, a fast-growing town 10 miles east of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. But in a few years, the city plans to connect all of its approximately 170,000 residents and 6000 businesses to big-bandwidth fiber. And it will use that network, and the processing power of volunteers' PCs, to conduct scientific research, such as the bone cancer analysis application that will begin in December.

Several distributed computing “grids” worldwide use this method to do anything from searching for AIDS cures to predicting the weather, all by borrowing PCs on the network when they're not in use. The most famous is Seti@Home, whose 5 million or so volunteers help sift through extraterrestrial signals searching for alien life. But most of these grids use geographically dispersed endpoints with a mish-mash of different last-mile connections. Almere is using a single city of broadband users with big pipes to their doorsteps: consumers with 100 Mb/s and businesses with 1 Gb/s.

“Because it's confined in one city, the latency of the network is much lower than larger networks, which means you can run applications that are suited for that,” said Ad Emmen, Almere-Grid's project manager.

And because Emmen will have a clearer view of the network and its users than global grid users do (including network quality, availability and capacity), he can better match the applications to the network, he said.

Emmen is conducting surveys to gauge citizen interest in volunteering. He hopes simple altruism will motivate them (“Advancing science — people in the Netherlands like to do that,” he said.), but because some have already voiced security concerns, he is investigating possible enticements, such as tax write-offs for volunteers. Longer term, if private firms will pay to use the grid, Emmen might consider using those fees to compensate volunteers.

Geoffrey Fox, a computer science professor at the University of Indiana and member of the Global Grid Forum, isn't convinced that Almere will be able to do much that Seti@Home-types can't. For one thing, though Almere will have less latency than global grids, it shouldn't make much difference as long as Almere's PCs are operating independently, he said. And even Almere's lower latency probably won't be low enough for parallel computing, which can only tolerate latency levels on the order of microseconds.

“I'm sympathetic to the idea,” Fox said, acknowledging that PCs might be managed somewhat more smoothly and efficiently on one local network than across the planet, “but it's not so obvious what you gain from the coherence of a city.”

Still, Fox admits that the combination of grid computing and FTTP is one worth exploring. Large financial institutions such as American Express are already seeing the benefits of grid computing for crunching large amounts of data over their own networks, but FTTP communities have no comparable success stories. Almere could be the first.

“FTTP-enabled Seti@Home[-type] applications with high-bandwidth data downloads and uploads, that is potentially a whole new class of applications that I have not seen studied anywhere,” Fox said.