From: Aaron Davidson (ajd@ualberta.ca)
Date: Fri Aug 13 1999 - 22:54:05 MDT
"COSM" Is distributed.net's spinoff to create a general purpose distributed
computing backbone for the internet:
http://cosm.mithral.com/
I am also writing some small time general purpose distributed computation
protocols for some my own projects, seeing as I have access to about 200
fast unix systems and a few hundred fast windows systems scattered around
campus.
I may as well make use of them!
Java is in a nice position for distributed work, since any java code can be
serialized and sent to any other computer regardless of OS and then
executed on the fly.
All of the above mentioned systems are only good for distributed
processing, and not true parallel computation. Only a small subset of
problems can make use of such systems, although there are enough such
problems to make these systems useful. We need much less latency before
parallel processing across the net becomes possible.
In the mean time, can anyone think of useful distributed applications?
I can imagine a large scale project using Genetic Algorithms could
potentially work. Each node could evaluate various specimens, then report
to the central server with the top percentile of tested specimens.
Tierra was more difficult because all of the specimens must be tested
against each other in a competetive arena, which does not parallelize well.
GA projects that can be tested in isolation would be ideal however.
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| Aaron Davidson <ajd@ualberta.ca> http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~davidson/ |
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