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Distributed Computing Economics

Posted by simoniker on from the get-your-flops-cheap dept.

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."

2 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting yet shallow economic analysis by Raindance · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was happy that Gray covered SETI@Home as I think the nature of SETI is akin to where certain aspects of distributed computing may go in the future. However, I argue that he left some some key parts of SETI economics at the door; most notably, data integrity and security. As I understand it, *over half* of SETI's processing power, bandwidth, and so forth is used to verify data integrity as it's using untrusted hosts to do it's calculations.

    This doesn't make SETI a poor supercomputer, but it does change the economics of it. An economic model of computing resources which accounts for work done by untrusted hosts as involving different overhead as that done by trusted hosts would be a much more useful metric to think in terms of.

  2. Re:SETI@home by flabbergast · · Score: 5, Informative

    The author points out: "The ideal mobile task is stateless (needs no database or database access), has a tiny network input and output, and has huge computational demand."

    "And of course, SETI@Home is a good example: it computes for 12 hours on half a megabyte of input."

    So, for projects that fit this model, then they should save money over supercomputers. But few projects fit this model, with the author mentioning web and data processing, data loading, CFD, ie anything that "generates a continuous and voluminous output stream" as economically unfeasible. So, car companies really do need those supercomputers to virtually crash their cars. =)