FOOTWAYS takes its first steps

What’s the connection between Normandy apple farmers and the back of a garage 314 kilometers away, filled with computing gear?

Plenty.

To protect their crop, farmers must use insecticide to fight off apple worm caterpillars. However, they don’t want to pollute the rivers and groundwater in doing so.

But if they use too little, the treatment will not be effective.

To solve this problem, farmers could turn to software tools developed as part of a recent European project. But that only contains a library of set combinations of climates, pesticides, crops and soils.

What they really wanted is something that gives customized information for their specific, unique set of conditions — a task ideal for distributed computing.

Enter a researcher who saw an opportunity. In 2008, Igor Dubus withdrew €13,000 from his bank account and bought tailor-made machines, cabling, a switch and a router, to cobble together a 96-node computer cluster in his home. Last summer, he quit his research job and created the company ‘FOOTWAYS,’ with plans of scaling up from his “garage-cluster” to a 12,000-node network.

Remarkably, he’s “not an IT person.” He said: “I’d never seen a router switch before.”

Supercomputing

Getting GPUs on the grid

As GPU-enhanced clusters become common, more and more will be hooked up to grids. The Magic supercomputer connected to two grids earlier this year. How does that connection work now, and how could it work in the future?

Overheard at the IT conference

Clouds in Geneva

How do business leaders define cloud computing?

‘A way of getting computer needs on demand — a bit like getting water piped to your home, but paying by the drink, not the bottleful’ was one summary.

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