Re: ::scr Seti@Home & Global Warming

[Alaric Snell <alaric@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 17 May 2002 13:49, you wrote:

> Anyway, The Grid's gonna tank.  Someone's just going to run Seti@Home on
> it and use up all the available cycles.  Then it won't be any good to
> anyone.

I agree there's little future in a vast unregulated shared pool of computing 
power - many say it would work just like the Internet, you offer your cycles 
in returning for getting other's unused cycles - but the amount of the 
Internet you can 'use' is limited by your upstream connection (and therefore 
how much you pay) while a Grid would lack that sort of limiting factor.

However, groups of universities and other such closed communities are doing 
OK with sharing their processor pools. If anyone abuses it, they'll get 
disconnected and shouted at - in a community heavily influenced by individual 
reputations :-)

I think that it might be useful within companies, too, if they have the right 
kinds of compute loads. Running data mining and/or batch processing across 
the workstations in the middle of the night (them all being on a 100MBit LAN 
anyway) probably has some value compared to buying some expensive central 
machine.

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software