The global machine

Distributed computing: where all the world is just one incredible machine

For some time now we’ve had the impressive ability to distribute computing tasks across the world. Thanks to the net, and the fact that most machines connected to it spend their lives idling, projects like SETI and Folding have enabled users to contribute to the greater (often) good.

In the beginning, this could only be taken advantage of by the few -- those that had both the bandwidth and CPU power to contribute since, sometimes, even the most friendly distributed computing clients could still had a habit of getting in the way when real work needed to be done. Frequently, people put old machines to good use as distributed nodes.

Today the proliferation of broadband and the advent of mulit-core CPUs casts a whole new light on the distributed computing paradigm. With high bandwidth caps and CPU power to spare -- aside from those times when a handful of games really put multiple-cores to good use -- it’s easy to run a distributed computing client and just fire and forget it, never really noticing its load on your box.

It’s also easy to forget we’re witnessing a trend that actually heralds what we’ll all be seeing and doing in the future: every computer on the net is a resource.

There’s a gigantic volume of excess bandwidth and power in the world’s connected machines at the moment that’s almost completely underutilised. Distributed computing has shown us what it was possible when such machines are tapped into. There is, literally, the power of thousands of super computers just waiting to be secured, should the right application come along. This is more than just esoteric projects like SETI, in the future it’s going to be about the actual infrastructure of internet services.

Bittorrent is a guide here -- as you YouTube has shown, video is hot property. Media companies would love to tie into this, but assuming the industry gets a clue and makes movies and TV instantly available to download or stream in high quality at a reasonable price, it simply wouldn’t be able to handle the load with just a few data centers and gigantic pipes to the net. Not in a cost-effective manner, anyway. And why do that all when the distribution architecture is already there -- you can bet ‘internet tv’ users, when the time comes, will be both clients and distributors in global and local networks.

You can just imagine, for example, if internet TV became the norm in Australia (bugger free to air, all through the pipe instead) with millions of users ‘tuning in’ each day, mainstream channels could be downloaded in seconds or streamed realtime thanks to the sheer volume of users. You wouldn’t even know a technology like bittorrent was in use.

And just think -- it’s already possible to employ green energy technology in the home (solar, for example) where, when you generate more power than you use, you can get credits against your power bill as your generated electricity is fed back into the grid.

There’s no reason why distributed computing projects for your average home user, and not just geeks in the know, couldn’t do the same with credits earned that could be applied against services. For example, the more your resources are used to distribute internet TV, the cheaper your service becomes.

Of course, that’s a ways yet. The internet and the nodes of all the machines connected to it is the single largest computing resource the world has ever seen, and it gets bigger every day.

But you can lead the curve -- check out Wikipedia’s entry and BOINC for projects to get involved with and donate some of those spare cycles and bandwidth. You’ve got yourself a multi-core beast, feed it and make a difference.