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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."
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.
I have been pwned because my
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".
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.
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.
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Wireless Grid Peer to Peer systems... With that many buzzwords, it can't miss.
mirror in case in of /.'ing:
http://100mbit.hexxxen.net/slashdot/death_taxes.pd f
This paper is *six* pages long, and Ian Foster has *sixteen* self-citations.
I know some insitutions rank their faculty based on the number of times their papers are cited, but they usually exclude self-citations in those counts.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Ever heard of KaZaA? Remember CloudLoad and AltNet? They are an alternative, commerical peer-to-peer network piggy-backing on FastTrack; serving paid content and crunching numbers. FT is currently the largest P2P network in existance, with over 5 million users, and their hashing/encryption algorithms for peer-to-peer authentication are secret (no one has yet to reverse Kazaa), so they can do anything they damn well please. Including merging P2P and "grid" computing. Which they have already done. (I'm waiting for PFT to come out and make grid computing optional.).
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Why stop at a grid? Why not spherical, hexagonal or banana shaped!
Here, I'll go out on a limb and make an even more daring prediction: grid computing will use Rendezvous-like services. Some of the machines may do that at boot time, to load customized and specialized machine configuration (you know, like BOOTP/DHCP followed by NFS), and others will use it at the application level to discover potential clients and servers.
All this stuff was designed into the Internet in decades ago. People are just giving fancy names to very traditional usages of sockets, servers, and broadcast packets. "Grid computing", too, is pretty much what people have been doing on networks of workstations for years: sometimes you push the jobs, sometimes available machines pull the jobs, sometimes you have a workflow manager, sometimes it's done through NFS, etc.
All of this reminds me of some teenager thinking that they are the first person on the planet to have discovered "sex".
I got rid of my old GRID computer years ago. The plasma screen was kind of cool, but the bubble memory was s-l-o-w.
Best Buy can have you arrested
It is a serious well supported argument. You are just shooting your mouth off with ad hominiem attacks which probably aren't valid.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
If you redefine anything that you like into terms that you find useful, then you can make your argument look really good.
If we redefine P2P from being a way of copying software and music to a way of sharing computational code across a network, then it all becomes so much more acceptable.
It's a conference for P2P. Did you really think they'd come out and say that it's a hopeless dead end? Did you expect they'd say that unless they can justify it's existence that P2P will be called a piracy tool?
I have been pwned because my
As these two technologies converge you'll start seeing white vans driving around residential neighborhoods with carefully hidden antennas sprouting from the top, snopping, like antiquated British tv detectors, for illegal activity on the grids.
Not long after that, the "virtual search warrant" and mandated backdoors in commercial grid products will appear.
Those fucks (**AA) would try to regulate telepathy if it existed.
-dameron
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.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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...
It'll be so amazing and cool that everyone will want to have it, so people will begin selling it. They will, however, quickly go out of business because the product they are trying to sell is available for free download on the product they have already sold ;)
The difficulty with this is not doing it, it's doing it on top of Windows.
As for "grid computing", if there was a real need for it, people who needed it would be buying up off-peak time on server farms. That's not happening.
Both ideas are promoted by people desperately seeking a revenue stream, rather than trying to provide a new capability. Unless they figure out some way to put a boot on the consumer's throat and make him pay, it's not going to happen.
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.
In the practicle department, we have two technologies we've used for grid computing. I'm going to guess you work on one we've used, Sun Gridware (now opensourced?) used to be Codine. It worked well enough. The interface was pretty easy, but for the users, kicking off programs to run randomly on a grid of machines was not as easy as...
Mosix (or OpenMosix). Now I'm sure theres a hundred good reasons why it doesn't qualify as gridware, but that is how we use it. It was simple to install and monitor also. Hidden enough, the engineers don't even know they are using it. Thats the kind of plug and play every IT manager wants.
The convergence, I agree is going to happen. But honestly today people just haven't become sophisticated enough to expect it yet. Or even want to. Perhaps it won't happen in our lifetime.
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OnRoad: Boldly searching for the efficiency our engines deserve.
Convergence of P2P and Grid?? Well, DUH. They're basically two names for the same thing. Almost.
I hope to see some of plan 9 in "the grid". Need another CPU? Mount it into the filesystem...
Come on! All recent Windows P2P software has come with distributed grid computing applications to collect marketing data. They are way behind the times here.
Er, they have.
My ISP and my cable company are the same legal person, same bill--and I can even rent a specalized "TV computer" from them if I want to.
Wait until digital HDTV becomes prominent, and network-wired houses are as common as telephone lines today. TV and PC will converge--it's just going to move along a multistep process at the speed of the slowest partner.
I've read the law, and I don't see what you're saying. In fact, if I recall correctly, the amount of distrobution and the profit made both factor into punishment, but a zero revenue pirate is still guilty, and may be subject to criminal law.
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Open Source Sysadmin
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.
And do I have to put a cover letter on it?