Swarm — a New Approach To Distributed Computation

An anonymous reader writes "Ian Clarke, creator of Freenet, has been working on a new open source project called Swarm. The concept is to allow a computer program to be distributed across multiple computers in a manner almost completely transparent to the programmer. The system observes the program executing and figures out how the workload should be distributed for maximum efficiency. Swarm is implemented in Scala. Its at an early-prototype stage, and Ian has created a good 36 minute video explaining the concept and the current implementation."

Comments

Re:Earlier

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And this one works at the application level, across various OSes. No computer repurposing and reinstalling is needed.

I doesn't do much yet

[svick]

If I understand what he says correctly, it is something like this: Distributing computation is hard, really hard. It's so hard that nobody ever did it properly. But Swarm will change this! How? Well, we don't know yet, there are so many interresting problems we have to solve first. And you can help!

Re:This'll be great for botnets

[jeisner]

That's true to some degree. But computers do slow down as they age. Components damaged by the constant heating cause more errors and therefore require retransmission or error correction, slowing things down.

My Dell desktop from 1999 has been running like the wind again since last week, when I reverted it to its 2002 state from backup tape. It goes superfast now that it's virus-free, off the network, and running old apps on Windows 98.

I was only trying to recover some old files before junking an unusable machine, but I may keep it around now as a non-networked machine for the kids.

Re:Name... Neat idea though

[Anonymous Coward]

From the FAQ:

Did you know that there are other projects called "Swarm"?

Yes we did. We do not believe that 100% uniqueness is a prerequisite for a project name. Remember that the word "swarm" has been in use for over a thousand years, it wasn't invented by any software project!

Our opinion (born of painful past experience) is that it is better to have a good non-unique name than a bad unique name. Of course, if someone can suggest a good unique name, we'll give it serious consideration.

Another Earlier - ERLANG!

[mcrbids]

Erlang apparently gets it right. Scales smoothly from single core to multi-core to multi-server in a near linear fashion. Astonishingly reliable, having achieved nine nines of uptime - much less than a second of downtime - in a year. Purposely designed to mitigate shared memory problems. Built for hot-switchover - you can upgrade Erlang problems without closing them first!

In just about every conceivable way, Erlang is the right choice for high-end multi-core multi-system clustered application development. I have a large-stack, clustered application written in PHP. While it works well, there are limits to what we can do within a single process - a problem that's likely to become worse over time as needs continue to scale up. If I were to do it all over again, I'd take a good, hard, look at Erlang.

Re:Earlier

[mrmeval]

It's not free software so you can't use it except for personal or educational use. Open Mosix died
http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/