Shirky On Umbrellas, Taxis And Distributed Systems

There's a good article from Clay Shirky talking about the similarities between umbrellas, taxis and distributed computing. And if you really want more P2P than you can shake a fork at, the folks at ORA have also released an excerpt from the upcoming Dornfest and Brickley book.

Comments

Where are the applications?

[Sanity]

My question with the whole distributed computation branch of the P2P bandwagon has always been one of "where are the applications?". The criteria for which applications would be appropriate for this seem to be rather limiting - these criteria are as follows:

Firstly, the algorithm must be parallelizable. This means that it should be possible to split an algorithm which normally takes N time, across a number of, say P processors, and have it take less than N time, and ideally N/P time.

Secondly, the algorithm must have minimal communication requirements. Rendering, for example, is parallelizable, however in most modern rendering applications each computer would need an entire description of the scene being rendered. This could be a huge amount of information, running into gigabytes, yet it would need to be distributed to every participant in the rendering process. Recall that in most distributed computation applications connectivity will be limited to a 56k modem which is only connected to the Internet intermittently. Even if you limit users to broadband, communication bandwidth is still a problem.

Thirdly, the algorithm must be robust, if someone decides to screw things up, and hack their client to send back malicious data (as happened with Seti@home) they must not be able to invalidate the work that everyone else has done. Ideally there would be an easy way to validate the work done by each client in the system.

Now, I am not saying that there are no applications which do not conform to these criteria, for example, cracking crypto algorithms and processing information from space telescopes in search of intelligent life clearly work quite well - however neither of them can really be used to make vast amounts of money. The only other thing I can think of are genetic algorithms, but again, whether there is a revenue stream there is an important question.

Perhaps some of these distributed computation people have found a killer application for this technology, some of them certainly claim that they have, but I really wonder whether such applications will stand up to scrutiny on the grounds I outline above.

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Will companies really see so much profit?

[stuyman]

I think the article makes lots and lots of interesting points, but I don't really see how a company can expect to make enough money off of these spare cycles to say double my DSL capacity and pay my electric bill. If they get paid a penny an hour, and they get 21*24 hours, that's still only around 5 dollar, which is nowhere near enough to pay for what they want to give as an incentive.