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Introduction to Distributed Computing
dosten writes "ExtremeTech has a nice intro article on distributed and grid computing." Someday someone will successfully implement something like Progeny's NOW and all of these assorted hacks at building a distributed computing system will be superseded.
I'd love to see a Beowulf cluster of...
Nevermind.
It's friday.
Yo... I must just have mothafuckin skillz or somethin'!
Holla back, all y'all Caltech and HMC bitchez!
Oh yeah, fp!
Or we could just spend 8 hours finding a buffer overflow in Brilliant's Distributed Kazaa software and do it that way.
Most new hires came in to work on projects that had the potential to bring in revenue sooner than NOW...
Um, maybe it's me, but how could it be sooner than now? If these guys have a working time machine, maybe they ought to try to capitalize on that instead of writing an OS.
it's Friday and I have nothing better to do than troll Slashdot.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
goatse.cx
Of course, computation in a vacuum (ha ha) is useless. Information on the results of the computations is carried around via cosmic rays, neutrinos and the like.
The really exciting thing is that the conclusion of the paper calls for research into the general direction that cosmic rays are flowing which may lead us right to the location of God Himself!
if the "department" line on it was simply:
from the imagine-a-beowulf-cluster-of
hey, at least I didn't post it with my +1
Distributed computing is actually a pretty simple idea to come up with, seeing as how a lot of things are 'distributed' such as manufacturing, selling products, etc. The thing that makes distributed computing attractive is the speed of data and the unused potential of your average computer. It would be nice to see a company that needed a lot of data processed, and paid people for every data pack they processed and completed. Rules would have to be set up to prevent abuse, but it would be a nice system. Everyone wins.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these ideas!!!
(no, but seriously, imagine... Beowulf of Beowulfs... the übercomputer... hmmm)
--pi
fp
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
A little boy got lost at the YMCA and found himself in the women's locker room. When he was spotted, the room burst into shrieks, with ladies grabbing towels and running for cover. The little boy watched in amazement and then asked, "What's the matter --haven't you ever seen a little boy before?" I hope this distribution brought a smile on this fine day!
The whole thing
Rather than a popup ad per page.
cs clan [tgk] 0wnz0red dis post!
When will we have distributed sex?
April 14, 2011: I sit down at my new copy of Windows 2010 to fill out my tax return. A dialog box pops up - "Sorry, but your computer and 36 million of its comrade workstations are busy working on Bill Gates' tax return. Try back again in a day or two..."
Someday someone will successfully implement something like Progeny's NOW and all of these assorted hacks at building a distributed computing system will be superseded.
While we're wishing for things, can I have a pony?
(Adding text because apparently it hasn't been long enough since I hit reply.)
--saint
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Warning: Offensive comments are not only allowed, but encouraged.
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BT 100 Basic Trolling
BT 101 Crapfloods
BT 102 Annoying Exploits
BT 103 NetCop/Moderator Evasive Maneuvers
Elective Courses
Take two electives:
BT 104 Racial Slurs
BT 105 Gay Sex
BT 106 Creative Writing
BT 107 OS Zealot Fundimentals
BT 108 Trolling and Current Events
BT 109 Creative Profanity
Required Courses:
BT 100
Basic Trolling
Students will learn the basics of Trolling and some key steps toward creating a good troll. Includes learning about your targets and looking for weaknesses. Stresses the use of real names in subject fields and actual data obfuscated to apear like you know WTF you're talking about. Computer lab course.
BT 101
Crapfloods
Learn about the many sources for Crapfloods, new and old, online
or in print. Includes the use of basic text programs and scripts used to make one Crapflood fit all, from *BSD is dead to the random anal hijinks of the Slashdot staff. Effective for
insanely stupid topics not worthy of a good Troll.
BT 102
Annoying Exploits
Make use of stupid bugs to piss everyone off, including fellow
Trolls. Some knowledge of Perl, C, Visual Basic, and Internet Protocols recommended. Web and IP proxies also discussed, as well as USENET and email servers. Computer lab course.
BT 103
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Prerequisites: BT 100, BT 103, BT 106, BT 109
heh :)
Thats what I got when i went to that site.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Condor is a very good Grid system that is freely available for Linux (binaries only).
Distributed computing. Bah, back in my day, distributed "computing" meant looking over your neighbors' paper and taking their answer.
What the hell happened to kick the can? Running with a loop?
You poor poor bastards and your "distributed" crap.
BAH!
Sent from your iPad.
OT
My eyes are getting tired. I just read the headline as "Introduction to DISTURBED Computing."
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
From the site...
"That was all right at the time, because it was easy to raise money for ambitious development projects such as NOW that could take years to develop and, thus, that might not pay off for years."
and
"...Most new hires came in to work on projects that had the potential to bring in revenue sooner than NOW"
if you are interessted in distributed computing over internet check out this url: http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/.
there is short description of all distributed computing projects plus lots of other stuff.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
My University just got a 395,000 dollar grant from the NSF. for more info : http://inside.binghamton.edu/March-April/4apr02/gr id.html">
... like the dogma project at Brigham Young University is a distributed application system currently on used on a few thousand machines. It is written in pure Java, requires no persistant storage on the local machine, can be interrupted at any time, and is OS independant, to name a few things.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
You know you want Seth's brown starfish.
I guess I really like the idea of distributed computing. In a world where everyone works together with common goals we would be able to achieve almost anything. The flies in the ointment, however, are the few individuals who would get their rocks off by ruining it for everyone else, the same type of people who write virii.
Another networking subject that really interests me is wireless networking. I think that someday in the not too distant future we will see neighborhood networks forming and then a linking of various neighborhood networks to form a new kind of "internet." One that is absolutely not controlled by any group.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
cs clan [tgk] 0wnz0red dis post!
with a large scale distributed system, using the distributed translation project things like this may in the future look like this.
"My buddies and I are wimps so we pretend to be big shots online. So therefore we have created a small group called cs group. Online we are also seen as [tgk] to signify our uniqueness from you. We (being cs group) would like to point out the fact that we know a lot on the topic of distributed systems and would like to tell you our thoughts. We know all our posts will get 5's"
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
There's a Distributed Computing Forum over at Anandtech
Is that for most intents and purposes, processor cycles are free.
If a company/organization has an *actual* need for processor cycles (say genome research), it's cheaper to buy 1000 boxes and admin the stuff in-house. Even when ignoring issues such as sending valuable company data to thousands of internet users, most applications that require large compuation also require large amounts of bandwidth, generally provided over a LAN.
This is why you'll never get to render a frame for Toy Story 5: Pixar will need to send you 5GB of data just to get back a 2k image.
Once you consider the costs of admining a network, writing/distributing your code, against having a tangible financial benefit from the results, few companies will have a reason to turn to outsiders for a few minutes on their machines.
Please post your IP so that I can turn you in. Thanks muchly.
--
Beef
"Raging Moderate" of the
First of all, be sure to check out the links at the end of the article to some of the projects that are going on right now. Some of the ones that I find more interesting are the Particle Physics Data Grid and the Access Grid (no link in article).
One of the great benefits of Grid computing over distributed computing is the access to resources, such as storage. This is what PPDG seeks to do, provide access to physicists, in near real time, to the results of experiments. The problem is that the experiments may be performed at CERN and the researcher may be at CalTech. While normally for a telnet or what not, this isn't a problem, it is a problem when an experiment can produce Petabytes of data. For more information on that see http://www.ppdg.org. There is another project called NEESGrid that will provide access to earthquake simulation equipment remotely. Truly cool.
I also encourage you to check out Globus. Using a system like the Globus Toolkit along with MDS, I can locate a machine and execute my program on it transparently. This transparency is taken care through a network of resource managers, proxys and gatekeepers. It's pretty cool and is pretty easy to install on your favorite Linux box.
Programming Grid enabled applications is pretty easy. There are software libraries called CoG Kits that provide simple APIs for Java, Python and a few other languages. In just a few lines of code you can have a program that looks up a server to run your executable on, connects, executes and returns the data to you.
The current push right now is towards OGSA which is Open Grid Services Architecture. This will form the basis for Globus 3.0. OGSA will take ideas from web services, like WSDL, service advertisement, etc, and implement them to create Grid services. This will be the next thing with services easily able to advertise themselves and clients easily able to find services.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
And then, someone (perhaps an Episode I actress) will, while eating a hot Canadian breakfast dish, make a Beowulf cluster of them..
These projects when described in the lay press nearly always skip over any analysis of the kinds of algorithms that can work well on a distributed system. The first metric to look at is the ratio of communication to computation. That is, how many bytes of data does a compute exchange with neighbor(s) before continuing with the next step of computation.
Render farms are embarrasingly parallel requiring no communication with neighbors while rendering a frame. They do require a large amount of data before starting on the next frame, but you can either pipeline that (which they don't do usually) or double up on the number of compute nodes (which is more common).
Suppose instead you want to solve a big mesh problem like a 3D cube with 10^10 points on a side. And its a fairly simple computation. You might need 10^5 or 10^6 nodes and the data traffic between nodes would look like a DOS attack if it took place on the internet.
And then there is the rich space of possibilities between these two extremes and the crossproduct with storage. It is a fascinating area to work in because there is much yet to learn and the possibilities for new networks and processors and storage evolves all the time. Things that were impossible to do last year are within reach this year or next year.
But.... just as 100 Volkswagon beetles may have the same horsepower as a huge earthmoving machine, the beetles cannot readily move mountains... and 100 or 1000 or 10000 PCs with a low-cost interconnect are not equal to a supercomputer or a supercluster that may support 10^6 greater communcations to computation ratio - and thus a much greater range of useful distribution algorithms.
This one covers issues such as parasite attacks, spoiler attacks, etc.
Slashdot rejected my guide when I submitted it. Whine whine gripe gripe.
This morning I woke up, with a terrible hangover and pubic hairs stuck to my chin by means of some sort of sticky substance, also on my chin. I couldn't remember what happened last night. This article is an investigation of the events.
I started out going to a tupperware party with my 45-year old girlfriend. I had to sneak out of the basement of my parent's house, because my parent's don't approve of the 25 year age difference. And I should say here that I use the term "girlfriend" loosely here. She is just some girl I bang. Well, woman actually. She gets really cranky when I don't introduce her to my friends as my girlfriend - I think its a menopausal thing.
I've never been to a tupperware party so I didn't exactly know what it entailed. She insisted that I went, though, as her date, even though I didn't want to. I had another party to go to, a friend at the McDonald's where I work told me about a kegger at his apartment, and I was stoked to go. I knew it would be clutch because the 16-year-old I'm banging on the side would be there. But, alas, I had to cancel those plans to go out with Agatha.
I picked her up at 7:00 - if I were a minute late, I'd probably get spanked, but in the bad nonsexual way. She came out of the house, carrying some tupperware. She demanded to see what I was bringing to the party. I stared at her blankly.
After a variety of racial epithets and minutes of verbal and some physical abuse, I was at the Target parking lot, walking in to procure some Tupperware. She insisted on coming with me to make sure I get the proper kind.
I bought some, and she poured some of her "food" into the new tupperware so I wouldn't come empty handed. We finally got to the party at about 8:00.
Thirty long minutes later, I was introduced to her friends. All menopausal, fat, ugly women who were embittered because their husbands and boyfriends had the common sense to leave them long ago. I was sitting in the corner, all alone, with nothing to do. Then I remembered something: I had a 5th of vodka in the back of my car.
I quietly snuck out of the party, grabbed the vodka and snuck it back in. If I put the vodka in the punch, I would see a whole bunch of annoying old ladies falling about themselves. What could be so bad about that?
Forty five minutes later, some 50 year old hag was grabbing for my cock. That's what could be so bad about it, I guess. I pushed the bitch away and told Agatha that I was leaving. She was drunk, but insisted on coming with me.
I was driving to the McDonald's party, with Agatha throwing up all over my leather seats. "Fuck," I thought to myself as I swerved recklessly down the road. "I need to dump her off somewhere before I get to the party." At a red light, I looked over at her and noticed she was sleeping. Hopefully, passed out drunk. I got out of the car, opened her side of the door (stumbling myself since I was drunk too) and pulled her out by her hair. I left off by the sidewalk, closed her door, got back in the car, and drove to the party.
I arrived and looked for my young pussy to say whats up too. I was shocked and apalled that she went with a large black man that was recently released from jail. I got a Mickey from the fridge and started talking shit to this guy in a drunken stupor.
I wanted to fuck the shit out of my girl - nothing puts the tops on a bad night than a little statuatory rape - but unfortunately "Bubba" was getting in the way. However, out in the parking lot he kicked the shit out of me in a short bloody fight. I can't remember what happened after that, but when I woke up, it was morning, I was in my bed, with a terrible hangover and pubic hairs stuck to my chin by means of some sort of sticky substance.
Any ideas? Hmm...
OMG BIG PENIS ATE MY SOUP
qadpz is an open source package for doing distributed computing. it supports a lot of operating systems.
FIRST: you get a computer!
THEN: you distribute it!
Voila! Distributed Computing!
(Damn, that's easy.)
...I am an Christian. To anyone willing to examine the evidence it is obvious that the God of the Bible created the universe. Consider the muon: the spin value is totally arbitrary yet perfectly explains many issues in cosmology. The Hand of God at work, my son.
This shows a profound lack of knowledge of the Computing literature. Back in 1982 (December issue IIRC), there was an article published describing The Newcastle Connection. This was a fully-distributed unix system built on exactly the same model. It was a unix system that incorporated other systems as components, treating the network as a bus. The result was a large multi-processor unix system.
They weren't nearly the last ones to announce that they had done such a thing. For a while, in the mid-80's, it was somewhat of an inside joke. It seemed that everyone was making their own distributed unix system using the same design.
I built one myself, and so did a fellow down the hall from me (at Project Athena at MIT). We both spent about a month of our spare time on it, and both of ours worked. One of my demos consisted of a Makefile with source scattered across as many machines as I could get accounts on. I showed that, despite the fact that the clocks on some machines were off by hours or days, my code correctly adjusted for clock skews and compiled the right things. I didn't need to modify make or the compiler, I just linked them to my libcnet.a, which replaced all the system calls with my distributed routines, and they corrected for the clock problems.
The problem isn't the difficulty in building a truly distributed system. Any competent software engineer should be able to do that. The problem is that the commercial world has no interest in selling such a thing, and the non-commercial world remains ignorant of things like this that were demoed several decades ago.
One of the true frustrations from having built such a system is having to work with things like NFS, that still can't get its clocks right (at least not without requiring super-user permissions on every subsystem). When I decided to solve this problem so that make would work, it took me a morning, and I didn't use super-user permissions anywhere.
BTW, the Newcastle system was used internally in a number of corporations. But the many attempts to make it more widespread just hit brick walls. So now we have the kludgery of HTTP and URLs rather than the simple, elegant schemes that the various distributed-system people have used.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You cannot counter my scientific arguments so you resort to attacking me personally. "Know the truth and it shall set ye free", brother.
I don't mind giving away cycles to seti@home or d.net but I'm anticipating that something evil is on the way here.
/me grabs tinfoil hat r ns-out-to-be-carcinogenic@home or Help-Monsanto-make-deadly-pesticide@home. What if those have running under Kazaa this whole time?
What if CureTheCommonCold@Home is really help-pfizer-make-$10-a-dose-cold-medicine-that-tu
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry