Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

One Computer to Rule Them All

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-in-the-queue-bind-them dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IBM has published a research paper describing an initiative called Project Kittyhawk, aimed at building "a global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application." Nicholas Carr describes the paper with the words "Forget Thomas Watson's apocryphal remark that the world may need only five computers. Maybe it needs just one." Here is the original paper."

7 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, right... by Yetihehe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not gonna happen. One computer - one organization as the power. Does all corporations use gmail? No. The ssame with OSCPW (One Super Computer Per World).

    --
    Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
    1. Re:Yeah, right... by somersault · · Score: 3, Insightful

      At which point you start to see were IBM's idea actually make sense--they are talking about building a worldwide, distributed, networked collection of cooperating computers... HEY, that sounds an awful lot like the Internet!! That's what I was thinking. Have they applied for a patent for this system, by any chance? ;)
      --
      which is totally what she said
  2. Good idea by stjobe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Putting all of your eggs in one basket always seemed like a good idea...

    --
    "Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
    1. Re:Good idea by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Putting all of your eggs in one basket always seemed like a good idea... Oh, I'm sure a massive supercomputer design from a company with the large-scale computing experience of IBM would be far from putting all your eggs in one basket. Have you ever worked on IBM mainframe equipment? This stuff has redundancies up the wazoo -- everything from multiple redundant power paths to multiple redundant CPUs and mainboards. You know how everyone brags about Linux servers have "three 9s" uptime? Screw "three 9s". IBMs large-scale computers have -- for all intents and purposes -- 100% uptime. This is why banks and financial institutions and governments and militaries rely on such machines -- because when you need it to run all the time and never go down, you get a mainframe. IBM's supercomputers are no different in that respect.

      --
      My blog
  3. Hosting the entire internet? by dreamchaser · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Huh? The Internet is not an application. It's just a big network. Sounds like marketing speak to me.

    Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of Internets! Bah.

  4. So basically... by AltGrendel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...they are going to patent the Storm Worm computer virus.

    --
    The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination

    - Douglas Adams

  5. Reinventing torrents? by Stan+Vassilev · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can't wait to be submit my credit card, using my e-banking or book airline tickets, to a bunch of random desktop machines hosting a distributed web application.

    I'm using edge cases? I'm being biased? Well, here's how IBM describes their project: "Such a computer would be capable of hosting not only individual web-scale workloads but the entire Internet."

    The *entire* Internet is vastly more complex and demanding on its *backend* than its *frontend* reveals. What can be hosted entirely on a distributed network of desktop machines precludes many trusted and secure online transactions we make use of in the Internet today. It's obvious from the get go, that this will be only usable for a limited subset of online applications (like, hosting Wikipedia for ex.?) , but I guess making overly broad statements caught the eye of some bloggers and journalists.