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I was just having this idea once and wondering if there's any possibility to harness the power of p2p distributed computing to make a virtual supercomputer with the following features:
This maybe unrealistic, just curious and want to know your views..
EDIT: Some interesting links I found while researching...
Good question! Nice to see someone considering such points. Philosophising over computer application and usage is important. What you describe is a Distributed System.
If I were you, I would consider looking at the likes of SETI@Home project and other "screensaver processes" that use redundant CPU cycles to process large amounts of data. Chances are that those guys will have considered this kind of situation before.
The main issues are:
This is the question of "how can I ensure my request gets processed when the node I ask to process the request may fail - and how do I handle such inevitable failures?" (see Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror piece on the Chaos Monkey concept (in today for a possible method of investigation
Memory speed (or CAS) would be so variable that this would mean that any application would have to have enough memory available locally, at the place of use, that it could manage its tasks. In the same way that a Windows machine uses a Page File, so a distributed architecture could use specific nodes as memory caches
There are other considerations (such as security, usability, and yes bandwidth to some extent although you can always add more nodes, etc) but these will suffice as a starting point for you. Good luck with your research.
No. And yes.
People both can and have used this type of system as virtual super computers. With special software, lots of companies have used systems like this as well. However every program written for any kind of distributed cluster needs to be painfully aware of latency issues. And in this kind you need to be painfully aware of bandwidth limitations as well.
In short you're dealing with a very different beast than a regular computer, and you won't be able to get any performance unless you are aware of the differences and find ways to accommodate them for your purposes.
Distributed factoring problems, yes. Distributed fluid dynamics models? Not so much.
Well I see some highlighted points and I'd like to add some more major factors to be taken into account, when you are doing a distributed approach the concept of failsafe is the critical one with so many components !!
But looking on the bright side scalability can be an easier transition with this system in place, but If i were to put my money on it the "virtual supercomputer" would definitely be having some serious performance and latency issues but down the lane it might just become the norm of the Super computing !
