Distributed Computing Economics

[Sip]

I thought this article by Jim Gray from Microsoft Research was pretty cool ... really puts things in perspective ... for the few techies around here (even the Macies ), this may be interesting reading.

 

Here are a couple of quote snips:

Computing economics are changing. Today there is rough price parity between (1) one database access, (2) ten bytes of network traffic, (3) 100,000 instructions, (4) 10 bytes of disk storage, and (5) a megabyte of disk bandwidth. This has implications for how one structures Internet-scale distributed computing: one puts computing as close to the data as possible in order to avoid expensive network traffic.

 

... SETI@Home performed a multi-billion dollar computation for a million dollars - a very good deal!

SETI@Home harvested more than a million CPU years worth more than a billion dollars. It sent out a billion jobs of 1/2 MB each. This petabyte of network bandwidth cost about a million dollars. The SETI@Home peers donated a billion dollars of "free" CPU time and also donated 1012 watt-hours which is about 100M$ of electricity. The key property of SETI@Home is that the ComputeCost:NetworkCost ratio is 10,000:1. It is very CPU-intensive.

 

Another interesting point was that he says that the google database is about 2 petabytes in size!!! ... yah, that's mega, giga, tera, peta

 

http://www.clustercomputing.org/content/tf...c-5-1-gray.html

[DominO123]

Oh! You just reminded me that I havn't reinstalled the SETI back after I reinstalled my system.

 

I'll beat everyone that doesn't have SETI installed in his computer... they should be considered as witch to be burned. SETI for everything, everything for SETI.