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Distributed Computing Economics
machaut writes "In a ClusterComputing.org article, Jim Gray, director of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Lab, provides an interesting economic analysis for building distributed systems. When do you choose a grid over a cluster or a supercomputer?
When does it pay off to move a task to the data vs moving the data to the task? He takes current hardware and networking costs into account to answer those questions."
Ungodly numbers of "Beo-Wolf" cluster jokes arriving now!
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When do you choose a grid over a cluster or a supercomputer?
When you have a really high-paying job where you are paid to make such decisions.
to Microsoft Bay Area Research Facility
Wow, what a world. $1 will now buy:
1 GB sent over the WAN
10 Tops tera-CPU instructions
8 hours of cpu time
1 GB disk space
10 M database accesses
10 TB of disk bandwidth
1 large beverage
1 of everything in the $1 store
1 unlimited phonecall from some 10-10-### phone company.
5 packets of cool aid
10 packets of generic cool aid
2 cans of coke
When I was a child, data was expensive, and food was cheap...
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of CDROMs.
This is already true. Most email traffic these day seems to be marketers talking to spam filters.
We only look at the cost of SETI from our perspective here on earth...but if you ever consider the enormous cost space aliens have to incur to make their secret communications appear as background noise, then I think more people would oppose the project.
His reasoning sounds good, but what the hey? It sounds pretty obvious that the most cost effective approach is to keep the data close to the CPU doing the crunching.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is more than a trillion dollars per year.
Operations costs far exceed capital costs. Hardware and software are minor parts of the total cost of ownership.
-- microsoft software is cheap so you should keep buying it. Even if administering it is expensive.
Megaservices like Yahoo!, Google,et all have relatively low operations staff costs.
-- Open source if managed properly doesn't need many people. But this formula can't be applied to the propreitary software shit you buy.
Most applications do not benefit from megaservice economies of scale
--Most microsoft products. We will still take our chunk of flesh no matter what.
Outsourcing has often proved to be a shell game - moving costs from one place to another.
--having a third party vendor manage your Microsoft software for you isn't going to save you much.
Web services reduce the costs of publishing and receiving information.
--But you will need a huge support staff to manage it plus lots of licenses. (see above)
Most Web and data processing applications are network or state intensive and are not economically viable as mobile applications.
--especially once the MS licensing is thrown in.