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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."

1 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Anybody tried it? by LinuxParanoid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's a nice piece of analysis. Someone could have done it 8 years ago when Java came out; the facts are not significantly different (The values are different of course but the ratios involved are pretty similar. I did some thinking along these lines back then, and then in 2000 when considering working for a "hot P2P company" that an old acquaintance of mine was running.)

    My thinking went something like this: There are only a few, "niche" applications which need more compute power and which people pay for (distributed rendering, CFD, FEA, maybe a couple others). Maybe you could build that into a 10-30 million dollar business if you overcame a zillion obstacles but it didn't look like a billion or multi-billion dollar business. The applications for which people buy beefy servers, and which have a monetary payback, are mostly database applications. For those, you need to move the entire database near to the number-crunching PC, and that's not really feasible due to the cost of transporting Gigabytes of data or the unlikelihood that the PC's hard disk can store all the giga/terabytes of information potentially relevant for the computation. Not to mention the security problem.

    And Jim Gray's analysis lays out in more precise economic terms why it doesn't make sense. I like how he even calculated the relative merits of a Beowulf-like cluster of PCs versus P2P which I never really analyzed (I lumped them together as basically similar.)

    That said, has anybody even made a stab at designing or implementing a relational database with a P2P architecture? I know that there's Oracle Cluster Server, but I'm thinking of something more low-end and more distributed.

    --LP