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A Simple Grid Computing Synchronization Solution
atari_kid writes "NewScientist.com is running a article about a simple solution to the synchronization problems involved in distributed computing. Gyorgy Korniss and his colleagues at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute proposed that each computer in a grid synchronize by occasionally checking with a randomly chosen computer in the network instead of centralizing the grid by having a global supervisor."
If I understand this correctly, wouldn't it contain the potential for the computers to become very desynchronized. What I mean is that, since each computer may become slightly off from all the others on its own, if each computer synchronizes to another random computer in the group, couldn't some of the computers become massively off?
Why is this news?
Distributed systems that do not rely on a centralised authority, be it for synchronising or resource distribution, are by far not a new thing. To name a random example (and you can find a dozen others with five minutes of Googling), the Prospero Resource Manager was a USC project started in the early 90s that relied on distributed authorities with no centralised command centre.
Furthermore, if the computers are self-controlling and not guarded by anything besides their internal mechanisms that rely on the checks on other computers, the potential danger lies in a computer in the grid having a seriously fscked-up internal state. In other words, can a malfunctioning computer be trusted to monitor itself correctly? I think not.
The New Scientist summary is lame. Pick up a copy of Science and read the actual article if you can. It says, "Here, we show a way to construct fully scalable parallel simulations for systems with asynchronous dynamics and short-range interactions." This method, while interesting, does not generalize to a wide range of applications. For example, you could not apply this approach to molecular dynamics simulations, which involve primarily long-range interactions between atoms. Still, the authors of this article are clearly pretty clever.