Friday, February 11, 2011
Techshare: Cloud and Cluster computing.
These are things that have fascinated me since I learned of their existence:
Cloud computing: essentially, your terminal acts the interface between you and some godtier beefy computers. By utilizing servers that share content, resources, and metaphorical horsepower, you can achieve superior performance and scalability. The benefits of using such systems include the ability to ignore location as a factor, so long as you have access to the resources. This is good if you're in an urban environment with reliable internet access- all of the heavy-duty processing and electric consumption takes place offsite. If you're in the boonies, this may present a problem if your connection is poor and/or slow. Examples include such things as the Amazon S3 cloud or Microsoft's Azure.
Cluster computing: the HHHNNNNGGG of heavy-duty computing utilizing ordinary resources to achieve extraordinary results. If you've got a computer that can divide up portions of a task such that it's computable by several different systems, you can network things such that results are expedited and individual workload is minimized. For optimized systems (or simple ones), this can result in amazing things- case and point, [ http://www.wolframalpha.com/ ], which is like a better version of Google (for certain bits of factual information).
Wikipedia's got pretty good articles on all of these.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cluster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(computing)
What sorts of applications could you see for this sort of tech?
Unrelated: What technology would you like to share?
Cloud computing: essentially, your terminal acts the interface between you and some godtier beefy computers. By utilizing servers that share content, resources, and metaphorical horsepower, you can achieve superior performance and scalability. The benefits of using such systems include the ability to ignore location as a factor, so long as you have access to the resources. This is good if you're in an urban environment with reliable internet access- all of the heavy-duty processing and electric consumption takes place offsite. If you're in the boonies, this may present a problem if your connection is poor and/or slow. Examples include such things as the Amazon S3 cloud or Microsoft's Azure.
Cluster computing: the HHHNNNNGGG of heavy-duty computing utilizing ordinary resources to achieve extraordinary results. If you've got a computer that can divide up portions of a task such that it's computable by several different systems, you can network things such that results are expedited and individual workload is minimized. For optimized systems (or simple ones), this can result in amazing things- case and point, [ http://www.wolframalpha.com/ ], which is like a better version of Google (for certain bits of factual information).
Wikipedia's got pretty good articles on all of these.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cluster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(computing)
What sorts of applications could you see for this sort of tech?
Unrelated: What technology would you like to share?
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Ya just like what they ere talking about on PCTVUSCTV. This is what we will evolve from.
ReplyDeleteWolfram Alpha is awesome, i found out about it like a month ago and have used it quite a few times.
ReplyDeletewolfram is how i passed dif eqs lol
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how long cloud computer has been around for, yet it's just recently starting to become big in the public eye.
ReplyDeleteQuantum computing. I can't wait.
ReplyDeleteFolding @ Home would be awesome with it, but the TOS state that it has got to be used on a machine that you own :(
ReplyDeleteMind = blown
ReplyDelete