It seems to be all about size and massive buildouts of compute and storage grids these days... both commercially (see Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Sun, IBM, HP, Oracle, etc) and in academia. The interesting thing is that the technology used is good for both distributed and centralized (tight clusters of distributed nodes) computing. Processing and storage can be pushed to the edges, or gathered centrally... it's up to you... the mechanisms are there... it's all converging.
The world is becoming a massive digital fabric.
I'm just fascinated by the scale of the data centers, operations, and services that are being deployed.
Article from NY Times last summer (June '06):
"The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and a big computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. Connecting these centers is a high-capacity fiber optic network that the company has assembled over the last few years. Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant processing power close to all of its users."
Wow. Now we do we understand why our systems must scale?
Related: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/05/24/On-Grids http://www.globus.org/toolkit/ http://www.sun.com/service/grid/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261 http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011
Copyright © 2006-2008 Corey Goldberg
Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.