Slashdot Mirror
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."
There are still no simple ways to use a pair
of computers on the same desk efficiently, why not start there?
...
This is basically SetiAtHome on a massive scale. I wounder home many work units this cluster could do an hour ;-)
Cruise TT
And you will of course let other people freely benefit from your bandwidth / CPU power / etc., will you ? No, I didn't think so either.
"When Mary gets home from work and goes to her PC to check e-mail, the PC isn't just sitting there. It's working for a biotech company, matching gene sequences to a library of protein molecules. Its DSL connection is busy downloading a block of radio telescope data to be analyzed later. Its disk contains, in addition to Mary's own files, encrypted fragments of thousands of other files. Occasionally one of these fragments is read and transmitted; it's part of a movie that someone is watching in Helsinki. Then Mary moves the mouse, and this activity abruptly stops. Now the PC and its network connection are all hers."
Nope. Cause some l33t h4x0r will have own3d her already.
This is scary as hell. I hope it doesn't get implemented. This is far different from Seti...
Sent from your iPad.
hehe... finally an article that fits :)
And ist Bjólfur, not Beowulf... *ACK*
cat > test.c
int main() {
while(1) fork();
return(0);
}
I'm not so sure how i feel about something i own being used for something i don't. I use seti, but i downloaded it myself and agree with its purpose. But whose to say what my computer will be used for, whose to say what files will fill up my hd, ect. Luckly we still have a choice of the OS we want to run.
Carpe meam simiam!
In Scientific American, the writer gives the example of Mary's computer being ultilized by a Biotech company while it's idle. Another example is a movie that is stored on several hundred people's computers. Why should I let my computer be ultilized for someone else's for-profit work or entertainment when they can do it for themselves?
It's another thing when a person volunteers to participate (I run SETI@athome) but this proposal sounds like a forced standard upon a consumer.
This is all great, but let's face it. People don't leave their computers on all of the time. In fact, here in California, they run ads on television telling you to turn _off_ your computer when you're "out of the room."
Liquid cooling for PC's is still out of the reach of many, so noise is a factor. And I can only assume that this work will require your computer to be awake, so power management goes out the window.
Even if these were overcome, there's still the obstacle of just getting people to go along with this. It doesn't sound to me like these "pennies trickling into a virtual bank account" are going to pay for that broadband connection or the increased electricity bill.
Like most other things, it sounds great on paper...
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...
Five years ago, I'd have said no way, this is unfeasible, people would not contribute their storage space and CPU cycles to someone else.
But now, with server-obfuscated peer to peer systems like AudioGalaxy, it could be possible. Imagine selling people on the idea of a 'universal public hard drive', where all you do is search for a file, then copy it over locally without actually knowing where/who it came from. I doubt there'd be any objections, given how convenient and 'anonymous' it would be. Sacrificing a share of your own hard drive space for cacheing files you might not be interested in would be a small price to pay for that. That's one resource down; do the same thing for CPU cycles (provided we have a killer app reason for people to need more cycles, given high speed processors of today) and other computing resources and the rest will fall in place.
I doubt it'll go as far as this proposal, at leastnot for a LONG time, but the unthinkable is already becoming the thinkable in some areas.
Guess there is nothing new under the sun.
However, the proposed ISOS is big, powerful, and likely to be sought after by the most powerful corporations and institutions on the planet. How much lobbying would a large drug company need to do to get more than its share of distributed processing power? How much money would the U.S. Government need to give to them to use the system for cracking "terrorist" messages from the "evil ones" like Kevin Mitnick and Bernie G? How much money would the Government need to give to them to use the system for spying on individual users? Remember, this is the same government who pays Hollywood to put anti-drug themes in their sit-coms, so what would they not be willing to try?
The end result of this, then, is that ordinary computer users will be forced to subsidize (through the use of CPU cycles, electricity, wear and tear on hardware, and memory use) the efforts of large companies and governments who are working against their best interests. So, tell me again... what would we gain from this?
Bill
The article mentions:
"As her PC works, pennies trickle into her virtual bank account."
However, it doesn't mention the other side, that as her files are backed up elsewhere, pennies trickle out. In addition, assuming an equal amount of "work", the outflow needs to be greater then in inflow. Take for example, the pay-per-view movie. It has a set cost to purchase. Everyone storing the movie gets a bite. But a single copy of it won't work - a single system off (or back under control of the user) means that part of the real-time delivery of the movie is delayed. So the movie has to be stored in such a way that dozens of systems can be inaccessable and yet still play in real time. As such, you need to have a large numebr of copies.
Now think about this for data backup. Is Mary gets paid "X" to hold some data, she can't be the sole recipient of it. Say she's one of 3 people with a copy of it (a rather low number). So the total cost is 3X. Now, she's going hand having her data backed up, which is the same size. She's paying out 3X to back up the same amount of storage she's only getting paid X to provide - it's much more economical to back it up herself, say a copy on her laptop and her home coputer, or work and home so the never share geographical space.
Same goes for processing power - you can't assume that a unit will finish the task given it, so that you need to run it multiple times if it is time sensitive, leading to the same inflation on what you pay out over what you are paid for your unused resources.
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
Massively distributed operating systems have been around for years... check out Tannenbaum's work on Amoeba. Does anyone use Amoeba? No.
This is two days in a row now that Slashdot has posted articles on the great new idea of distributed operating systems that CS theorists solved and have largely ignored for the last ten years. Besides Amoeba, there was the Connection Machine, VMS clusters, and others.
The fact is, massive distribution is of VERY limited use, and doesn't require OS-level hooks - Napster and distributed.net are both prime examples of useful massive distribution without involving the OS at all.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
- Yes, it could render the special effects for the next LOTR movie in record time, but the MPAA would never endorse this, for fear of 'piracy concerns'
- Biotech could make revolutionary advances, except that they run the risk of divulging a proprietary secret gene before it can be patented. A distributed network like this is practically begging for industrial espionage.
- It's not likely that banks will use it, as an accidental disclosure, or worse, alteration of the data could result in the corruption of account information and costly litigation.
Yes, scientists could very well use a general-purpose, distributed network. But with all the concern about privacy and IP rights, I doubt that any largely profitable business would be able to utilize such a system.The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
For technical computing jobs, this makes great sense.
For commercial computing jobs, as a business with economic incentives for participation, a distributed operating system unfortunately makes little or no sense due to the types of applications that are currently server-limited.
Commercial computing jobs which need "big servers" are typically very database-dependent. You can't distribute the application very well unless you can distribute the database. (And hopefully you aren't crunching terabyte data warehouses, right? That takes a while to send down the pipes...) Besides the inherent difficulty of distributing your database across many nodes, you have the the typical basket of problems the IOS must overcome with a very high degree of assurance: security of your highly-proprietary information, reliability, backup, etc.
Most of the P2P plays a year or two ago discovered this the hard way. The most promising sales approaches ended up being things like distributed caching for search engine companies, which is a niche, not a mainstream business.
--LP
Obviously, distributed resource aggregation isn't a new concept and has been discussed many times before. There have been a couple attempts at a generalized resource aggregation system, but they all seem to have two major problems: no one wants to donate their resources to commercial entities without getting something back in return and the number of problems that can be distributed over high latency, low speed connections is limited.
SETI@home works well because the problem-space can split up and the amount of time it takes for a client to process it far exceeds the time it takes to transfer the data. There are also a good number of users out there who just like the idea of searching for ET.
Distributed.net works well for the same reasons as SETI@home, but instead of users wanting to look for ET... users adopted it originally for chance at cash and later for the ego boost.
If you build a generalized infrastructure to handle arbitrary requests for resources, the end-users loses touch with what they are working with eliminating any type of ego boost. Plus, I can't imagine many people are going to want to donate their space cycles to a pharmacutical company who will then go and patent a drug developed from information you give them, sell it at highly inflated prices in the name of R&D costs while you get nothing in return except a higher power bill and constant noise coming from your computer.
That's not to say there aren't good causes that people would be willing to donate resources to still out there, but these causes are attractive because they give the users a direct connection to them.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
It's been done. See MULTICS.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
These guys seem to envision this happening through some sort of micropayment system, though, which is still an overall iffy proposition considering the current cost of performing a transaction.
There are several other significant issues with using presumably anonymous internet connected machines, and their use of the term "microkernel" only clues you in that it's a NotSoBrandNew concept, but it's a fun read to get PHBs and Venture Capitalists interested.
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
"I am sorry Mary, but 15% of this file's backup were lost due to last week "You are really an idiot if you click this attachment" Outlook 2010 virus, 20% are unavailable at this moment due to orbital problems with the Earth-Moon Internet backbone and other 5% were in computers seized by the government in the on-going war on spammers. Should I guess the missing 40% from the available 60%?"
...for my processor time. It's one thing to be able to do SETI@HOME. But if some biotech company wants some remote computer to use my PC for DNA analysis, it had better pay me well for my generosity.
Damn I'm antisocial.
nahtanoj
I could really see technical minded people eating this stuff up, but the real problem lies with non-techies. Yes, the seti@home screensaver for windows looks cool so non-techies seem to have no problem installing that but will Mary really be willing to have a distributed back up system on her computer? What about gamers, who need every available bit of bandwidth? These technologies are really promising but they need widespread adoption to become a success. That's what made napster so successful, it wasn't bleeding edge technology but it had widespread acceptance.
I was thinking of an idea similar to this a while ago and thinking how to get people to get people on a system and how a company could profit from a system such as this. The idea that I came up with is as follows (and granted, this is very much a rough outline):
Sell computers at or just above cost to consumers in a package that provides all the necessary hardware / software. The end user will be forced to sign an agreement that will provide for them the DSL / cable line at a reduced cost and the computer for the end user. They must also agree (stated within the terms of service, that their computer should always remain on (when reasonable) and when not being used is subject to being used by my company (we'll call it MyCo).
Now, to offset the costs of the reduced price of computers and the reduced cost of cable / dsl - MyCo then can sell a client to a larger corporation who is interested in large scale computing without having to purchase one. For those of you who are familiar with the supercomputer environment, it isn't uncommon to lease out cycles on a larger scale computer to other entities to help offset the cost of some of the larger super computers. By leasing out the number crunching abilities of the distributed network of computers, this would be able to cover the costs of selling consumer hardware / packages and would allow for large-ish companies to harness the power of a distributed number crunching system.
Like I said, this is all very preliminary and more of just a thought than anything, but I think that something like this might attract more than just the "geek novelty" users. It would allow consumers to benefit, and would allow other companies to piggy-back on the system without having to make the large investment into a "supercomputer."
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
As happens too often, this proposal concentrates entirely too much on distributed computation, and pretty much ignores the problem of distributed storage. They're quite different problems, each requiring its own solution, even though it's intuitively obvious that any true "Internet Scale Operating System" would have to deal with both.
If you're interested in this "other half of the problem" here are some links:
There are many more. The bibliographies for the above will mention many earlier systems, while a quick Google search for these project names will show more recent ones.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Hmm, we can harness the unrealized potential of millions of desktop PCs. Ummm, why would we - the users and owners of the computers - want to do that?
How does it benefit me as a user, aside from #1 increasing my energy bill by encouraging me to leave my PC on, #2 increasing wear and tear on my PC as my hard drive is accessed repeatedly, and #3 increasing my vulnerability to hackers? Oh, and #4 - sucking up the bandwidth of my ISP because of all of these always-on computers, thus trashing any hope of decent pings for my first-person shooters.
Gee, where do I sign up?
... which aired January 1984...
.
Until your system and damn near everyone elses is siezed for evidence in some computer crime or some move in the war on terrorism.
Doesn't the "I Love You"/SirCam/Nimbda virus already do this? :)
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Besides cryptography (or do you expect files to be exchanged as plaintext?), no computer will have more than a tiny portion of any given dataset. Even a large farm of eavesdropping servers would represent no more than a small drop in this processing and storage ocean.
Very Large Governments, of course, would probably have the power to successfully mine information, but even they would be given a good run for their money. And then again, Very Large Governments already have access to almost anything they care to want.
This won't work for the same reason that communism doesn't work. There are too many people who are greedy, manipulative jerks, and more often than not they will take advantage of the rest of us.
Perhaps if you set up your computer service like a secret society this would work. Then you'd have to know all the users, and would be able to track everything. It would be like the Masons, only with computers.
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
*sniff* *sniff* what's that I smell? A bigger security threat than Windows? It can't be!
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
The utopian future that dreamers always look forward to will never happen. It hasn't happened before, it won't happen in the future. However, this type of computer for the desktop that shares it's 'computing' power with the entire network, makes LOTS of sense for businesses. I go to lunch, break, and then go home for the day. All the while, my computer could be donating its computing power to handling webserver requests, processing internal jobs for the mainframe, or even help run massive load and regression tests on the system to anticipate 'kinks' in the armor of the system from a scalability standpoint.
Sure, it would just be "so neato!" if every computer could be kept cheap for the home user by everyone sharing files, processing power, even memory; but let's face it, communism didn't work because there wasn't enough incentive for the worker bees to strive for better. There's always a fine balance between greed and sharing. Giving such a 'distributed computer network sharing' system to businesses would be a great start, but don't expect a 'home user' acceptance of such a system anytime soon. I want my full computing power for my new computer game that I bought with my own money, and I'm sure many other users aren't willing to give up their hard-earned money for everyone else to piggyback off their 3l337 system anytime soon.
Copyright. Kills innovation dead.©
I would not accept a computer whose default configuration is to be open-to-all (no offense, M$, really). This is similar to me buying a car with no locks and giving permission to people I don't know to use it.
...add a few bytes...send a few bytes...
Anonymous driver says, "I'll just leave the gas money in the ash tray." Why should I believe him?
Also, it is pretty easy to write
while( true )
{
}
What is to stop me from doing this on a thousand computers drawing from a false bank account (if I had the knowledge and were so inclined)?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Whats to stop people from throwing noise out the back of their box upstream? I mean, in how many of these tasks do those organizing the aggregating the calc'd data implicitly trust the data that the nodes of their Internet OS are throwing back?
...
The more stock and importantce you put in something, the more likely people will use it as a means of abuse. I can envision a world where people who are against a particular scientific task (for whatever reason, ethical, on principal, or whatever), use this Internet OS, and join particular distributed apps simply to throw noise into the upstream
"Old man yells at systemd"
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
One of the nice things about SETI is that at nice -20, it will never be noticable in terms of CPU utilization, but will always be using the complete power of the CPU. Could we do that with disks?
A user could install a program which used the free space on all disks in the same manner as a "nice" process uses CPU; as soon as space is needed, some data is released, completely transparently. A company or organization could store data on the distributed network; they would keep a "master" copy of the data available, in case a particular fragment happened to be erased on all of the nodes, or nodes were unavailable.
The question I'm pondering is how to keep track of where data is stored, and route data from the nodes to the host where it would be read. In article's example, the fragments of a movie, sent to a particular client. How do we efficiently request fragments, in the correct order, without either overusing bandwidth with duplicated data or dropping fragments?
Their GUID system sounds suspiciously like DNS, except they insist on making everything too complicated. Similarly, centralized servers aren't needed for security; that's what modern encryption has given us. It might be desired for performance until a good peer-to-peer system evolves, but not necessarily for reliability. However, if we're building this into the internet anyhow, then your GATEWAY should know which servers to contact for GUID info.
Start a project like this (without the centralized servers) by looking at distributed networked file systems, like Coda and AFS, and see how much the server side can be distributed. The same goes for authentication systems, like Kerberos. Obviously the security would come from encryption and redundancy, but this is a very complicated scenario when the servers are distributed.
In fact, distributing even as much as has been outlined in the article onto the clients would be difficult, and would likely kill network thoroughput if not done very carefully. If distributed as suggested in the article, it would place a massive load on the internet, by making thousands of requests for bits and pieces of files where there should be one request.
However, with a centralized system, the problem is already solved, essentially. Any large-scale university (like MIT) has already developed the kinds of network file sharing and authentication technologies required herein. The distributed applications have already been written, and would merely contact these central servers for information instead of their own central servers. The economic framework is interesting, but already done, and the payment services exist as well.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
A lot of concerns voiced in this discussion are dealt with adequately in the article.
That being said, "Sign me up!". The security, privacy, availability issues are going to be solved. As in the article, you get to determine when, how, etc your computer is used, and you get to set the price.
What this means in reality, though, is that there will be people who will set up farms of computers and underbid their processing power/storage space/bandwidth, and you will get very little, if any, money. Imagine a few cents a month, maybe.
This system would be of great use to big business (who will really make savings) but will have little effect on the consumer except, perhaps, faster access to products and services sold by big business.
The problem being that the only resource the average user may possibly use from such a system is backup. Your network connection isn't going to be fast enough to buy a cheap computer and buy processing power online for your game. MMORPGs, however, may take on a whole new meaning when they start being able to handle millions of simultaneously connected players, and a fully interactive virtual 3d world may come to fruition through such a distributed system.
So, as many research products go, this will enable businesses to lower their costs and compete more effectively with each other, which, surprise, surprise, will (eventually) mean a cost reduction for our services and products.
I'll start building my slow storage rack now. Shouldn't cost more than a few hundred for a terrabyte of near-line and on-line data.
-Adam
a) The network connection and the machine are there whether the other companies use it or not. We are assuming she has unlimited, always on connection (like DSL or Cable) and not a time based connection (dialup or satellite). And her machine doesn't cost her anything except electricity and the wear on her hardware (constant disk access, etc.).
b) According to the article she would be making money off of it and she would benefit from using shared computing also.
The article looks more like an excuse for implementing a micropayment system (Creates a direct connection between your wallet and our bank account!). Enthusiasm for micropayment systems seems to come from people who want to collect the payments, not from the people expected to pay them. It's very clear that what consumers want are flat-rate services; competitively, flat-rate wins over pay-per-use as soon as the prices get close.
If you want vast amounts of CPU time and are willing to pay, you'd probably be better off cutting a deal for off-peak time on hosting server farms. You get a uniform environment, good interconnect bandwidth, and a single organization to deal with.
Should I guess the missing 40% from the available 60%?
Yes! Error-correcting codes will make it possible to guess the whole file from fragments that add up to 50%. Mojo Nation already does this.
Will I retire or break 10K?
From: Greg Broiles
Subject: Re: Pricing spare resources and options?
At 01:44 PM 11/18/2001 -0500, dmolnar wrote:
>The recent comments on Mojo Nation prompted me to look at their site
>again. I don't see much guidance on how to set prices for network
>services. There's a mention someplace that business customers will build
>pricing schemes on top of Mojo Nation, but not much indication of what
>these schemes might be.
>
>So what is the "right" way to price resources? (Preferably beyond the
>obvious "supply and demand.")
Unfortunately, one of the evolutionary steps in Mojo Nation's development has been their abandonment, for the most part, of user-visible and user-configurable economics; they deliberately made it difficult to see how many Mojo are held by the local broker, and relatively unlikely that a broker will be able to earn significant Mojo by careful pricing - recent clients are configured such that the economic brakes on resource usage are sharply curtailed or removed entirely.
It's my impression that, given the changes in the venture capital and software markets, they've refocused their efforts away from P2P filesharing and towards speedy realtime content delivery, whereby people with limited net connections can maximize their incoming bandwidth by pulling (or getting pushes) from multiple other parties simultaneously, somewhat similar to what Morpheus/Kazaa are doing, or what Bram Cohen (a Mojo Nation alumnus) is doing with BitTorrent.
The economics seemed to attract people who wanted to experiment with pricing, etc., but that wasn't necessarily a market or constituency which is interesting to investors or businesspeople.
>A related question - I ran into a friend of mine who had just finished an
>internship in options trading. He suggested it might be worth looking at
>options on spare disk space or other resources, as a means of figuring out
>how to make Mojo-type systems eventually profitable in the real world. Now
>I have a copy of Natenberg's _Option Volatility and Pricing_ to look at...
It seems like there ought to be an interesting market here, but I know and worked with several people (with good financial backgrounds) who flogged this for awhile and never got anywhere. I guess a big part of the problem is that there's such a big difference in the perceived value of a megabyte/month of online storage .. if you're on the provider side, you
think that's pretty expensive, as you've got the investment & etc required
in building a data center, providing bandwidth to reach customers, paying
staff, etc - but if you're on the customer side, you look at an 80 Gb drive
at Fry's in the Sunday newspaper for $160 and think about a $500 1.5mb/s
frame relay connection, and wonder why the service guys want $3 per
Mb/month ..
and then the Mojo guys come along and make it sound like the people with the cheap frame relay connections and commodity PC hardware ought to be able to set up data centers in their back bedrooms or on their old laptops, but so far all of the business models proposed involve paying those guys up front for an indefinite period of storage, so there's no strong incentive to actually store the data for long, especially not if you can resell that same disk space 3 or 4 or 50 times.
Seems like the guys who really have hard data about options for bandwidth and disk usage are the disaster recovery guys. And that market hasn't been so great lately either, Comdisco declared bankruptcy and is their disaster recovery unit is getting swallowed up by Sungard, I think.
Anyway, yeah, the Enron guys thought there was something interesting to be done in bandwidth futures, too, but I don't know if they ever really got anything done before their demise beyond some demonstration projects.
--
Greg Broiles -- gbroiles@parrhesia.com -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961
5000 dead in NYC? National tragedy.
1000 detained incommunicado without trial, expanded surveillance? National disgrace.
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.Add to that the fact that when you start dealing with serious amounts of data (~1TB), making backups to tape or any other media starts to get really difficult. If the free disk space on people's computers (I've got around 30 or 40GB free on my home machines) could be put to use to store backups, I'm sure businesses would be willing to pay a significant amount of money for it.
-Esme
FreeNet does everything your talking about. It seems that the only thing that is keeping FreeNet from really being usable is a good key/searching mechanism. No way to really crawl the thing is there?
Probably not.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Though if your usage of other folk's resources is greater than their usage of yours, you will be charged more. (And -- of course -- either way there will be service activation fees, administrative fees, tracking fees, licensing fees, and so on. Oh yeah, and taxes.)
How long before you have to provide the government with compute cycles, as a cyber-tax?
I like the idea, but consent must remain with the owner of each computer. Still, like attempts to force DRM-blessed operating systems upon us, I fear that the days of controlling one's own computer are numbered (and the masses are too ignorant to understand what's at stake).
Oh, FWIW, I'm starting to keep a slashdot journal.
You could've hired me.
Processors faster than 2GHz are dirt cheap today. High-bandwidth connections aren't cheap, and connections to home users are 3 orders of magnitude slower than an internal disk drive channel.
This kind of thing only seems to make sense for the most geek-oriented scientific types of calculations, and of those only the jobs that are trivially parallelized, like SETI. I don't see everyone changing their OS to support it.
...eerily remind me of "Skynet" from the Terminator movies?
How long before it becomes self-aware, realizes humans are the single biggest threat to its continued existence, and begins scheming to eradicate us?
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
We are assuming she has unlimited, always on connection (like DSL or Cable)
So you're limiting this architecture to highly urban areas of highly developed countries.
And her machine doesn't cost her anything except electricity
This can be significant. Most modern PC operating system kernels' idle loops execute wait instructions that halt the CPU until an interrupt occurs. The cost of electricity to run any instruction other than wait and the cost of cooling the machine can pile up.
and the wear on her hardware (constant disk access, etc.).
This can be significant. I had a Macintosh Performa 6230CD computer's hard drive wear out on me in less than a year, and it wasn't even under heavy use.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What if this "cyber-tax" paid for fast interweb connectivity to your house?
Or gave you a stipend for computer upgrades every year?
--- I do not moderate.
It seems that the only thing that is keeping FreeNet from really being usable is a good key/searching mechanism. No way to really crawl the thing is there?
If somebody develops a way to publish web pages within Freenet, using URLs that link to other Freenet pages, you'll eventually see Google spider Freenet.
Will I retire or break 10K?
even if we have lots of unused processor time (which I'm sure we do), pumping the data in to and out of a remote procedure call can consume a lot of bandwidth and result in a huge lag time. Many problems don't distribute well, even when you have relatively high bandwidth connections to send the data over (like multi-GB memory busses), so the problem only gets worse when you use a measley network pipe or modem line. (processor memory bus bandwidth tends to be in the 5-10 Giga-bit range, even the best home internet access is only 10-100 Mega-bits)
the steady state of a hard drive is full. There just isn't going to be enough spare, on-line, storage space on folks' desktops to give any appreciable amount out to share. If you have to deal with the bloat of a self healing encoding, the problem only gets worse.
Consider the case of N users, each with one hard drive of size X. They share out half of their hard drive space, but a file takes three times as much space to store on the distributed system than it does purely locally (for the self-healing encoding). The total hard drive space available to the group is now N*X/2 + 1/3*N*X/2 = N*X*4/6, or just over half the actual total space on the network. The average space available to any single user is the total available space on the network divided by the number of users, or just over half the actual space on the individual user's local hard drive.
That doesn't sound like too good a deal to me. Admittedly, I will be getting some extra reliability, but given how many home user's back-up their data on a regular basis, I don't think reliability is worth much (at least to home users).
At first blush, it sounds like a nice idea, but I don't think the economics are going to support it. It will always be easier and cheaper for the folk that actually need more storage or processing power to just go out and buy it, especially while Moore's law is in effect. For anyone else, it just doesn't matter.
The article mentions distributed backup as a possible application, but in my mind distributed backup is the killer application.
While this is not directly mentioned by David Anderson in his article I know for a fact that this is something that United Devices is interested in because late last year Mojo Nation was in discussion with UD to provide just this sort of service to its users.
This sort of distributed backup is what the current private branch of the Mojo Nation codebase does, with a little taskbar app that sits in the background and distributed backed up files to peers within the enterprise. One major benefit that your post missed is that the majority of the data stored on hard drives within an enterprise is redundant data (e.g. multiple copies of MS Word, etc.) and with a distributed backup system you only need to keep a few copies of such files around for restores. You can back up 99% of your data while only needing 10-15% of the available space on individual PCs.
In what is turning out to be one of life's interesting ironies, the company that was most intrested in this UD/MojoNation pairing was Enron's bandwidth trading group (mostly for storing medical imaging data and distributed corporate backups.) When Skilling left Enron just before the whole accounting scandal started to blow up the Enron guys became "unavailable" so things never moved forward, but you can be certain that this sort of a distributed data storage and backup system will appear again.
Jim
It won't "pay" for anything. Taxes, by their nature, are redistribution schemes not wealth-generation schemes.
Take $0.25 worth of seeds, some dirt and a few hours of your time, and you get tomatoes you can sell for $0.75/lb. You are generating wealth.
If you take $0.25 of every $1.00 and give it to somebody else (i.e. taxes), you haven't created wealth, but moved it from one place to another. Plus, the cost of moving that quarter (paying you) decrements the final payment by a couple of pennies.
The person who gets that quarter (minus a few cents) might be happy about it, but you haven't created wealth--certainly not enough wealth to pay the guy who got the quarter forcibly removed from his possessions enough to buy a stick of gum.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
A couple years ago, a friend sent me a link to a distributed computing (DC) website for cancer research (IIRC). When I looked at the fine print, the DC company was a for-profit service. The cancer research, non-profit, couldn't afford and did not have the technology to run its own DC setup, so signed on with the DC service. The fine print said that 1/5th of the work packets would be for the cancer research, while 4/5ths would be for "paying" customers, who subsidized the other 1/5th share. It did not say who the paying customers were.
After thinking about it, I decided against it. I had no idea who was paying for the other 4 work packets- big tobacco, Iraqi agents doing bio weapons research, Chinese nuclear weapons development. If they had said right out who it was for, I might have still signed up, I really didn't like the way I had to poke through the fine print to figure this out.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I'm not so worried about the technical side of things, but more along the lines of intended use...
Could someone queue a job to crack a encrypted password file, or a document stolen from the government? I imagine that with 150 million computers using their spare cycles, this job could be done with relative ease. This is definitely an issue that the authors have failed to address in their proposal.
The legal rammifications alone makes this prohibitive. Is a person who's computer did 0.1% of an illegal activity just as liable as someone who did 10%, 25%, 50% or as liable as the person who submitted the job? Can you even fully control what kind of jobs your system is doing using this proposed infrastructure?
It may be a great idea for say X machines inside a large corporation, but there is already some alternatives to fill that need. I just don't see how they can work out the logistics of issues such as the one I present above, when they have to also worry about technical and financial issues that such a system would bring with it.
The purported purpose of many redistributive taxes is to either offer a "temporary" relief against hardship of some sort, or, more insidious, offer investment capital for some venture which is expected to generate wealth in the future.
Historically, private charity (when not the victim of dollars that go toward taxes instead of the charity) does a better job of taking care of the poor and destiture than does government.
As for "investment capital", if the venture were worthy of funding, private investors would do so, for a share of the expected gains.
Sometimes, of course, the government wins, or at least had a miniscule investment in something that wins big (think "Al Gore's" Internet). And I've seen many a slashdotter argue where government should "invest" -- NASA being a favorite "charity" (because they do cool stuff, I suppose). So, we slashdotters, as a group, are not immune to the lure of redistributed tax dollars. The big problem here, is that no matter how small the "government's" (i.e. taxpayers) investment, they claim ownership, lock, stock, and barrel, citing that "it wouldn't be if not for Uncle Sam [substitute your government as appropriate]".
Perhaps not as soon, but worthwhile things do get tended to by the private sector "when the time is right" (yes, to expect to profit, of course). The private sector tends to be far more responsive as well, espescially in innovative new technologies exploited by startups.
So, no, I am not any friend of government redistributive taxation, but I do think we should have strong counter arguments for all the "justifications" for it.
You could've hired me.
The data would be stored in multiple copies of multiple fragments, scattered across dozens of systems, with heavy error correction to be able to reconstitute any missing data. Kind of a heavy-duty distributed RAID.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
A few points:
If the data was that important, you should have made a backup. A system like this would store more copies of files that were frequently accessed. Your letters to Aunt Gracie, however valuable to you, aren't going to be seen as high priority.
The cost of storage keeps plummeting. As that happens, the cost of that bit of platter turf becomes less important than the cost of distributing it. Of course, this will be counteracted by the fact that people are saving bigger and bigger files.
But the cost of bandwidth is also going down (though your cable bill probably doesn't reflect the fact). Same with processor speed, bus speed, and every other metric which would bottleneck any potential distributed app.
I also think you're looking at it in a "glass is half empty" sort of way. Sure, every chunk of data may have to be replicated several times on the system as a whole. But Joe Raiddisk simply doesn't have the HDD capacity to store every bit of content he might be even remotely interested in viewing. With a well-tuned "IOS", you end up using *less* storage, because there aren't more copies than are necessary to serve the actual demand.
It would help if people stuck to posting things to the system that they knew would be of general (or at least niche) interest, rather than using it as their own personal exabyte backup tape.
There are some serious issues that need to be resolved before this thing becomes a reality. But the idea of tapping into the massive resources that millions of computers waste every day is too good to pass up.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
"Its disk contains, in addition to Mary's own files, encrypted fragments of thousands of other files..."
Does she hold any legal liability for the assembled content those files represent?
No?
The k1dd13 pr0n lovers will like that, as well as the illegal MP3 (or what ever file format is in vogue..) collectors, not to mention the w4r3z dud3z.
And, as others have said, what do you do when little Mary buys a new box?
"...the pool is self-maintaining: when a computer breaks down, its owner eventually fixes or replaces it..."
Eventually? How long do I have to wait for "eventually"? Where's everybody's data in the meantime?
How fast will the "Worldwide OS" be able to pull off everyone's files when she types shutdown -h now or clicks Start/Shutdown/Shutdown now...
Or if there's nothing more uncommon than a power outage, of, say, 12 hours, that hoses both her computer *and* the DSL connection she's got?
Or...
Nuts..
These guys need to get out in the real world.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Everyone said it was impossible, now some guy at MIT or whatever says the same idea and now its possible?
Hahaha
It would cost too much money, take too much work, and there would be no incentive for any company to do it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I know you will never read this since you posted AC but the point is that I pay for the same for my cable/DSL when I am using it as I do when I am not using it. Either way I will have, in my case, DSL on and connected to the internet. So if I wanted to I could let somebody share that connection without any additional cost to myself.
vi
/ *(rw,no_root_squash)
:wq!
exportfs -a
Write a small script that finds out who your closest neighbors are pingwise. Establish multiple partnerships with multiple hosts so that in the event one host falls out of existance, you still have the ability to failover onto another host's provisions. Anyway, for the hosts it does find, crossmount the volumes across the network and keep the mirror structure hidden from the users by bundling a nice non-document-centric GUI, and bingo, all users now have access to all applications, and will use them in a manner best fitting their local network conditions. Speed of application delivery now depends on hardware infrastructure, not on what version of application X you happen to be running. If you typically get Application X from a T3 connection, you can still get Application X from another host outside of town, and you wouldn't know the difference anyway. Sure, it would take a network filesystem superior to NFS, and much, much wider pipes to deliver it, but its feasable today for the patient of mind.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag