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something like Progeny's NOW and all of these assorted hacks at building a distributed computing system will be superseded.

Comments

The whole article at once

[Spackler]

The whole thing

Rather than a popup ad per page.

check this out

[emir]

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.

Re:The problem with distributed computing...

[Rajesh Raman]

You're missing the point. Distributed computing is not about only running on machines that aren't yours, but also efficiently utilizing the machines that are yours (or at least have easy access to).

Consider that a University of Wisconsin study showed that, on average, computers on desktops are idle at least 60% of the time. And that doesn't count the cycles burned lost between keystrokes --- I'm talking about extended periods of time. For example, almost all desktop machines are idle during nights. That's 50% already. Now add lunch time. Meetings, etc.

That's when systems like Condor come in. Researchers at Wisconsin got hundreds of years of CPU time on machines they already had without impacting others.

Coming back to your argument, the counter argument is that you may not even need to buy additional boxes --- just use the ones you already have more efficiently by utilizing distributed computing systems.

As far as "freeness" of processor cycles, let me tell you that the optimization researchers can soak up as much cpu as you can possibly throw at them. Also, if you look up Particle Physics Data Grid (PPDG) and GriPhyn, you'll find out that many distributed computing problems are I/O driven.

++Rajesh