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Internet-scale distributed computing?

Eric @ Zomething eric at zomething.com
Fri Feb 27 00:56:28 EST 2004 
Skip Montanaro wrote at (precisely some time which Martians cannot sync their watches to)

> Failing to find any obvious references with some googling, I turn to the
> Python folks who have lots of information about lots of different
> application domains.
> 
> I'm sure many of you are aware of SETI at Home, Folding at Home and Google
> Compute, all tools to tackle certain large computational problems on an
> Internet scale, typically by soaking up unused cycles on otherwise idle
> computers.  A bit of googling didn't turn up any others, so I'm wondering:
> 
>     1. Are there other active projects similar to SETI at Home or Folding at Home?
> 
>     2. Are there tools available to make it easier to build such
>        applications?
> 

Skip,

I believe the magic word you need is "GRID".*

You have to keep up with the marketing guys or Google will elude you.

(Grid, computing):  http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=grid+computing&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-tab-web-t&cop=mss&tab=
(Grid, computing, Python):  http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=grid+computing+python&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-tab-web-t&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt

==> oh, wait, Yahoo doesn't Google anymore:

[Google]
(Grid, computing):  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=grid+computing
(Grid, computing, Python):  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=grid+computing+python


* apologies if "GRID" isn't Internet scale, it's my best hunch at a starting point.  I would guess the main difference between a local (LAN) grid and an Internet-scale WAN grid is in the network latencies, and I suppose that would affect some of the logic (maybe just the sizing of hand-offs?), but I am not sure how much.


Eric P.

[exercise for the reader is to compare and contrast the Yahoo and Google results... oh where is PyYahoo when you need it?]
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