E-Business
Issue No. 9 - February/March 2003
Just One More Computer Please
by David Twiss
For many of us a computer is the thing they check their email on, and maybe use to write a letter, or surf the Internet. Despite the ever more onerous requirements of the operating system and the application software, these uses do not really tax a modern PC. Spare a thought, however, for those folks who are trying to use PCs to do some really ‘intensive computing’.
Historically, to make real progress on computationally complex problems, one would seek out time on a high-powered mainframe computer. What kind of problems? Well, look at http://www.netlib.org/bench-mark/top500/top500.list.html and ‘read between the lines’ to get some idea what people use supercomputers for.
Leaving aside the uses such as modelling the weather, simulating nuclear reactions and cracking ciphers, you would be right to assume that some people use supercomputers to help develop new pharmaceutical drugs (eg. Bayer), and to model financial markets (eg. Schwab, Barclays and Bank National de Paris).
This super-computer stuff is all very well if one has super-budgets to spend, but is there another way? Well, yes. Remember Napster, that pesky music-sharing program that so irritated the Recording Industry Association of America back in 1999? Napster was a piece of software for PCs that allowed each PC to ‘share’ music files over the Internet. This was an early instance of so-called peer-to-peer computing, with no one computer in charge of who shared what with whom.
Now, while sharing music is all very interesting, (especially if one is a US college student in a dorm with a really fast Internet connection) there really must be more to it. There are some classes of problems that are particularly amenable to being broken up into components, having the components individually computed, and the results coalesced at the end.
How about using several PCs to work ...
