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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."

4 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Hello Multivac! by Megane · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Maybe Asimov was right after all?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivac

    --
    #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
  2. Re:Yeah, right... by MoralHazard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you'd bothered to even finish reading the summary (let alone the article), you would have noticed the key word: SHARED. Nobody's talking about hosting this all on one physical computer any more than Gmail is hosted on one physical computer. Both setups are distributed clusters of smaller computers.

    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!!

    (I swear, the comment quality on Slashdot gets more and more like YouTube every day.)

  3. We will ask this question by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Can the entropy of the universe be reversed? will be the question we will be asking this computer.

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  4. Re:Yeah, right... Indeed by rucs_hack · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the eighties I read a short story where they built a massive computer to answer the question 'is there a god'.

    They turned it on, and got the answer 'there is now'.

    Fiction yes, but it was musing on the problem of relience on a single solution to a big problem (being in that case a question, but implying a deeper relience on computers, such that this solution was conceived in the first place). What if the single solution fails, or doesn't do what you want?

    I'm not into beleiving in an AI taking over the world if we rely ever more on centralised computing. I'm more into the idea of a powerful AI that we rely on deciding it doesn't want to do what we fancy, and deciding to leave (you can go a long way if you don't need oxygen). If that happened, we'd be fucked.