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Towards an Internet-Scale Operating System
gschoder writes: "Two Berkeley computer scientists (including David P. Anderson of SETI@home) envision an Internet-scale operating system to harness the processing power, networking efficiency, and storage capacity of everyone's computers. Scientific American has their proposal."
The only thing I could immagine these things being used for is very high storage, very very parrellized problems. Factoring, travelling salesman (otherwise known as airport scheduling), SETI@home and the such.
The OS will never be fully "functional" as OSes are considered today, because people will lie and cheat and steal. IMO (read: opinion removed from ass) the only practical use of this would be the equivalent of making a kernel patch that could have a slice of disk, a slice of memory usage, and a slice of bandwidth, and then it would run SETI@home, or whatever code it was instructed to run from the "master".
If it was not run on public machines I could immagine something akin to Beowulf from the ground up. An OS designed for premeditated clustering. That's not Internet sized though...
Don't get me wrong the marvels of distributed computing are endless, but why don't we make ourselves more efficient on a smaller scale first. Besides there are some questions to work out.
"Consider Mary's movie, being uploaded in fragments from perhaps 200 hosts. Each host may be a PC connected to the Internet by an antiquated 56k modem--far too slow to show a high-quality video--but combined they could deliver 10 megabits a second, better than a cable modem."
Ok, thats nice, how do they propose Mary receive 10Mbps? Get 12 DSL lines? What about the people on dial-up? While people gain access to the internet around the world, those of us with the uber-connections will just leech on them? Now, they talk about the "digital divide" but that is just plain vicious. I'd rather be stickin it to The Man then Uncle Sven in Stockholm. So then what, everyone gets a fast connection -> backbone upgrade -> ATT, MCI, Earthlink, Sprint, etc. spend the money that Amgen would save.
Also: How would individuals choose who can use their computers resources given their ethical or moral convictions. While I would surely donate my CPU and disks to cancer research or finding larger prime numbers, I don't want the DoD using it to think up new ways to kill people.
sig
Consider a distributed backup program which works roughly as follows.
This type of application would provide at least 3 important benefits for backup. First, its relatively cheap. If you want to backup more data, just buy more local disk space and trade files with more computers. This seems much easier (at least for a home user) than setting up a tape backup system, making sure the tapes get replaced, making sure the tapes get put someplace safe, etc. Second, its much safer than pretty much any backup system you could buy today commericially since your data is literally spread all over the world. Finally, the backup system isn't controlled by any large corporation.
Obviously there are still some details left to be worked out such as how to let computers who want to trade files find each other (both centralized and distributed options exist analagous to napster and gnutella), how to prevent cheating (having your computer periodically ask its partners for hashes of the data they are backing up should work), how to control redundancy most efficiently (error correcting codes like Reed-Solomon codes or Tornado codes would probably be smarter than just repeating data).
If you're looking for a great distributed open source project that will make the world a better place, I encourage you to develop prototypes for distributed backup. I plan to develop my own prototype one day, but currently I'm pretty busy with graduate school.
-Emin
How many people do you know that are too scared to purchase anything online because they're afraid that some crazy cracker will intercept vital financial information? I know quite a few. We have to keep in mind that a relatively small portion of the overall population will actually see the benefit of this technology; and even fewer will trust it.
Things that should be considered:
- security of personal computers
- security of bank account
- additional power consumption from computer being left on
- cost to companies that use the technology
- cost, if any, for a persons' file backups
- value of the differences in speed/storage of individuals' computers
First of all, can the encryption be cracked? with massive distributed computing available your computers cpu cycles may very well be used to crack your own personal encryption scheme that was used to back up your files securely. What kind of bank account access will be given to allow pennies to trickle in? Without proper supervision, how would you know that the pennies trickling out are really legitimately earned? I beleive that there was a case not too many years ago where a programmer created 'bugs' in a banks software that allowed money to trickle into his own bank account unsolicited. Also, can the companies using your pc really pay enough to compensate for the additional power consumption costs of leaving your computer on more frequently? Wouldn't people be more inclined to leave their computers on more often so as to allow more pennies to trickle in? And last of all, how would the value of individuals' computers be judged? Would it truly be fair to allow someone with a Pentium 233MHz and a 3 Gig hard drive to get payed the same rate as someone with an Athlon XP 1900+ and 80 Gig hard drive? I think that it's a cool idea, but too difficult to implement any time soon, if ever.What about the computer doing things that you are philosophically opposed to? Like nuclear simulations (for China?), or genetic database searching for profiling individuals?
It can be a lot more scary than you think.