Convergence of P2P and Grid Predicted

tom_conte writes "From the proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'03), "On Death, Taxes, and the Convergence of Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing" compares the two current popular incarnations of distributed computing technology, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Grid Computing. It also predicts the convergence of the two technologies: "The complementary nature of the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches suggests that the interests of the two communities are likely to grow closer over time." This paper is worth reading if you want to clear up the marketing cloud that surrounds these two technologies and sometimes makes them hard to distinguish."

Comments

Sounds like...

[ObviousGuy]

Sounds like the P2P folks are getting a little antsy looking for any evidence that P2P isn't just a really good way to encourage copyright infringement.

Grid computing can survive just as well without P2P. I'm not so sure that it's the same in reverse.

Re:Sounds like...

[JMZorko]

I've been involved in a lot of P2P work, and it is definitely a wonderful technology, and it also solves a big problem -- it is an enabler for reaching ever-larger numbers of people / clients. P2P systems can be implemented such that the more clients participate, the more room there is for clients to participate. Like the article says, P2P solves the "my parent node failed" problem pretty well (by dynamically reconnecting to another parent node).

Really -- if you want examples of P2P use that aren't the often over-hyped file-sharing scenarios, imagine an FTP server that can scale really well, i.e. the more people who are using it, the more capacity it has. Imagine SOMA FM being able to stream to orders of magnitude more people than it does now, by having clients on fat pipes reflect the stream they're getting to others. Sure, there are still problems to solve in this case (latency, especially for live-as-it-happens type content) but the potential, I think, is incredible.

Regards,

John

Grid Computing,

[Visaris]

As my professor described it, is a system similar to a power grid. You can plug in anywhere, and use the resources (Disk, Memory, CPU) of the grid for computation. Your resources would be added to the "grid collective" as well.

It seems as though this system would inherently be P2P. It's good to know the P2P people are starting to realize that there is more the P2P than file sharing. As for the grid people, they knew their system could be called "Peer to Peer" all along.