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Convergence of P2P and Grid Predicted

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the assimilation dept.

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."

10 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. The future of the Grid by deanj · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The grid has been trying to gear up from academia/research for so long, I can't even remember when I first heard of it.

    In the aftermath of the dot com crash, companies are falling over themselves trying to snag onto the "next big thing".

    Now we have two different worlds colliding, with people pushing 'em that have been ignoring each other all this time.

    They've at least recognized this, however, there's still a HUGE problem.

    They can't make it easy for the average person to install and use.

    They (the Grid folks in particular) seem to be missing this, big time. Globus is NOT easy to install...it's not an out of box experience like any of the P2P things are. It's a multi-day install, and you have to know what the heck you're doing.

    Secondly, the world doesn't need yet another Corba-like thing to make everything interoperate with everything else with MORE glue on top of it. KQML should have taught people this lesson back when that was all the rage in agent systems. If you want two systems to talk to each other, couple 'em in whatever language you want and stick to it.

    There's so much extra overhead in doing tasks that "the grid" is supposed to take care of....man, I wish these people would just sit back and take notice of the other distributed systems out there that are out there and working and solving problems without foisting yet another distributed computing paradigm (oh hell, I can't believe I used that word...forgive me), on the world.

    Lord knows we don't need it entangling reasonably well put together P2P systems with the tentacles of the heavy-weight "Grid".

    1. Re:The future of the Grid by BWJones · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They (the Grid folks in particular) seem to be missing this, big time. Globus is NOT easy to install...it's not an out of box experience like any of the P2P things are. It's a multi-day install, and you have to know what the heck you're doing.

      Apple seems to be on top of this with technologies such as TCP/IP over Firewire and most notably, Rendezvous technology. The potential here is amazing.

      --
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    2. Re:The future of the Grid by deanj · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Please enumerate these companies. I'd love to consider them as possible customers. Currently grid computing is mostly met with, well deserved, skeptisism

      I mean companies like IBM who are looking for the same customers you are.

      Globus is fucking trivial to install

      Unless Globus has gotten a helluva lot easier to install in a recent release, "fucking trivial" is a load of bullshit. I've done, and other people I know have done, several installs each, with people that knew what they were doing, and I'm telling you, even with that help, it took at least two days of farking around to get it to install properly.

      So I call major bullshit on "fucking trivial"

      Right, because agent systems and grid are *so* similar.

      Come on now, KQML was a language for doing REST (to a first approximation) a grid is a far more complex concept

      No shit. The panacea of KQML was that "everything will talk to everything else", just like the grid, and Corba. You know what? Everyone dropped KQML because they realized they DIDN'T need to talk to everyone else. They just needed to talk to themselves. You end up with so much extra baggage because of this it ends up being a complete pain in the ass.

      Again, a complete and utter lack of understanding what the grid is about. Your comment amounts to having a cabal of grid programmers bless a particular language and then demand that everyone write to it. Dumb. Not that there aren't language bigots in the grid community that would do that if they could, but dumb nonetheless This completely misses the point. The point isn't to have everyone write in the same language, it's to have a simple system for people to use. The extra hurdles that people have to get their programming language usable on the grid aren't trivial, and not every language is supported. It adds complexity to the system that shouldn't be required.

      The grid solves problems that exist and aren't being solved in other ways except through enormous investment by each and every company that wants to solve them for themselves. Well, now's the time for me to call bullshit. No one is doing this now...they might in the future, but I seriously doubt it. Companies aren't going to be forking over their computations to other companies to do, when they can do what they've been doing in house. More hardware might be sold, but it won't be shared.

      In the end, if the grid does actually get used anywhere, it'll be in-house, or in academia. And even there, people are arguing which place is the right place to host most of the activities...which, is completely STUPID, IMHO, because it completely misses the point! I've been in those meetings where they're deciding "where we'll concentrate our X computations" and "site Z will be where we concentrate our Y capabilities". Holy living crap! I've never seen anything so farked up in my life. There are a lot of really pissed off people here because of that.

      Another analogy. Your comment is akin to demanding that instead of adopting Windows (which is a hassle to install, run and keep secure) that they instead write their own operating system tuned to their own needs. Sillyness

      This completely makes my point. We don't need another one of these things. There are plenty of lighter weight alternatives out there which people have developed and have been using for the last few years. One great example is Cisco's Spanish Inquistion built on top of Jini. (spare me the language bigotry...not you...the other readers of this).

      I wish luddites would do a bit of reading and educate themselves before assuming that everything they didn't come up with is nonesense.

      And double at ya....most of the last eight years (and my involvement has been for the last six) has been pedaling this crap. The dot.com crash is what made people latch onto this. Before that, you couldn't give it away...which is ironic, because they were.

  2. Killer app of the '00s by Enry · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Noone can really define it, everyone wants an app that can do it, and companies that claim to do it are getting a lot of interest.

    Ecch.

  3. DC++ by caluml · · Score: 3, Interesting

    All my OS-disabled Windows using chums are banging on about an open source P2P app called DC++.

    It's open source, and all, but there isn't a Linux client. Any l33t coders out there that are bored should look at bringing this to the land of Linux.

    And yes, I understand the irony of calling them OS-disabled, and in the same breath complaining that my OS of choice doesn't have the same facility.

    --
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    1. Re:DC++ by OuD · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Have you checked out dcgui?

      Don't know if this one is DC++ or just plain DC (what's the difference between them anyway?), but it has nice features like multi-hub search, and I've used it successfully.

      I just feel the problem with DC is that there doesn't seem to be any way to resume broken downloads from other sources automatically (or maybe it's just this client).

  4. Harumph by SlowMovingTarget · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In the future:

    Computers will control our houses and your high definition television will be your main terminal

    Someone will make a mobile phone that doesn't suck as a PDA (or a PDA that doesn't suck as mobile phone)

    We'll all evolve more agile thumbs from "texting"

    There will be One True programming language (not a troll)

    Everyone will type on a Dvorak keyboard when not using a flawless voice interface that does what you mean and not what you say

    We will bathe everyone in the electromagnetic glory of Wireless

    As computers get faster and faster, and software gets more and more efficient, every user interaction will receive nearly instantaneous responses

    VR is the next big thing

    Build from a solid foundation and some of things will happen. Build from fragile abstractions and a sneeze will knock out the grid. The promise of technology is not the promise of earnings or market creation. How well does it help us live our lives.

    Flush toilet, books == good

    Pager, way-too-fast-food == bad

    ...Crawls back in cave...

  5. "Invitation Only" by asv108 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I love how the IPTPS is invitation only, considering that most of the hackers who made P2P technologies as popular as they are today, wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell in getting an invitation before they released. The concept of an invitation only P2P conference goes against all the ideas which ignited P2P development in the first place.

  6. Re:Someone has an ego problem... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Yeah but have you looked at some of the papers. Sheesh, some of them have like 10-20-odd some authors. Maybe its just me but it seems a bit like piling on when it comes to grid computing. I mean come on, how much have you really contributed to the paper when you are the 17th author on it? Sheesh. It seems it would be much more accurate just to list people in an Acknowledgements section and leave the authors for the ones who did most of the work/writing.


    Also as an FYI, these are bad papers to have on your C.V. unless you are the big person in the field. They amount to diddly squat unless you are the primary author or a bigwig.


    Then again, I just might be jealous of the copious amount of citations but hey, whatever floats your boat I guess. Amen to being an anonymous coward....

  7. "Scooped, Again" says it better by rewrkng · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Another paper at the same Berkeley conference, Scooped, Again by four Harvard researchers, has much more to say about the overlapping set of problems being tackled by the P2P and Grid research communities.

    The paper's title refers to the Web having been implemented by those outside the systems research community, who had elegant solutions to interesting problems but didn't pay enough attention to needs of users. The authors are afraid this might happen again if P2P researchers ignore the needs of Grid users. The third generation P2P infrastructures represented by systems such as Tapestry, Pastry, and Chord are amazing. For example, with one of these, you could implement a truly distributed DNS system that doesn't use hierarchy or centralization, and thus would be much more immune to DoS attacks than the current system. P2P researchers should heed the Call to Action at the end of this paper.