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Scientific American Article: Internet-Spanning OS
Hell O'World writes: "Interesting article on Scientific American outlining what they call an Internet-scale operating system (ISOS). 'The Internet-resource paradigm can increase the bounds of what is possible (such as higher speeds or larger data sets) for some applications, whereas for others it can lower the cost.'"
Devoting compute cycles to specific, worthy causes is great, but the point of an ISOS would be to make all connected hosts more powerful and efficient. If I want to factor a large prime or predict the weather, I might have hundreds or maybe thousands of otherwise idle computers available to help with the task. So each processor is constantly busy.
Privacy is very important but can certainly be worked out. For one thing, data could be stored in "bit stripes" so that each byte of your data is split into 8 separate streams but stored in more than 8 foreign hosts for redundancy and availability reasons. In that way no one could reconstruct any portion of your data from fragments on their drive and no laws could be broken by storing chains of bits.
Also private and public space could be partitioned off so that things you want kept on your system would stay there and only data associated with your weather predicting program would get stored on the ISOS. And quotas would need to be enforced so that if you donate 100GB to the ISOS storage then you may store, say 30GB (due to redundancy) in the distributed system yourself.
And perhaps your CPU's MIPS rating and uptime could be tracked to keep things fair. Then it would be almost like your computer storing up its processor cycles and getting them back all at once when you have a job to run. Grid computing makes sense and a World Wide Grid could make sense if it is feasible and the logistics could be worked out. Imagine everyone everywhere having the power of a supercomputer at their disposal.
The time of super fast home-PCs is likely to not last very long. The incoming .NET and dotGNU waves are likely to make thin clients much more realistic.
.NET takes off), it costs very, very little to put in an Athlon, versus a Pentium 100, and that cost is swamped by the display cost. You still need memory on the client side for buffering. You still want a hard drive on the client side for other buffering (like video; a one minute buffer fills RAM pretty fast, but on any conceivable real-wrld future network, we'll need those buffers).
.NET does not eliminate the need for fast computers, it just moves it. And the need for more power will be with us for a while yet. We're in a computation bubble here, but voice technology, video streaming, REAL teleconferencing, better video games, and a lot of truly desirable things are still waiting for us over the computation power horizen. And that's just the applications we KNOW about...)
Can you back this up with any real facts? Today, for $500, you can own a bare-bones Athlon system, which 20 years ago was a supercomputer, minus a bit of memory.
Even after we hit the Fundamental Barrier, whenever that is, computers will continue to improve for a while due to architecture improvements and innovative designs (like 3-D chips, currently totally unnecessary but providing one road for expansion in the future).
It gets to the point where on the consumer level, in a very short period of time (specifically, *before*
Maybe YOU call a 4GHz Athlon II w/ 512MB of RAM and a 100GB hard drive a thin client, useless to Mary. I call it a dream come true. You have to postulate a Major Breakthrough within the next two-to-three years in display technology for the cost of the display not to swamp the cost of at least (more realistically) a GHz machine with 128 MB of (fast) memory. We'd probably know about it already. So, do you buy the $200 "thin client" that can't do anything on its own, or the $235 "I'd kill for this machine in 1985" that runs fifty times faster, and feels ten times more responsive?
(I made a couple of assumptions in this post. But one way or another, Mary needs a super computer in her home. Either for use that looks like modern use, or to serve as the central server for the house. I, and many others, even amoung the computer non-savvy, will NOT farm my data out to a foriegn entity!