Dan Creswell
Posts: 49
Nickname: dancres
Registered: Apr, 2003
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Re: Distributed Computing Economics
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Posted: Jul 8, 2003 1:55 PM
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Good article, IMHO. Clearly articulates where Grid computing is likely to provide benefits and why.
The downloadable code aspects are certainly interesting from a JINI perspective but I think there's a slightly different philosophy at work.
JINI has always had the concept of downloadable proxies and with good reason as it allows a client to start using a service given just an interface description.
It's often been suggested that such a proxy might actually contain the service itself but, in a lot of cases, the proxy communicates on the client's behalf with some back end (potentially stateful) service.
So, the client downloads the proxy once when it starts to use the service (and may download it again in the future but not very often IMHO) and does only a little computation. Most computation goes on in the backend which is, typically, close to it's data/state/storage.
Now, thanks to multicast discovery, it's easy to have the client only locate services in the near network vicinity (just use a small TTL) rather than try and use those on the other side of the world, in network terms. Thus the client potentially has only a few hops to the service which should be close to it's data.
In conclusion, I think JINI already provides some useful mechanisms to get a handle on these economics it's more an exercise in whether we use them or not.
It'd be interesting to take this stuff and consider the implications for wide-area clustering/replication issues....
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