Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 21st Aug 2009 22:34 UTC
I've often wondered why computers - be it laptops or desktop - are so relatively monolithic. Wouldn't it make much more sense to have a whole cluster of very tiny individual computers, all with their own tiny processor, RAM, data storage, and serial ports, which power up when needed and are easily replaced when broken? Well, Liquidware thought so too, and came up with the Illuminato X Machina.
Thread beginning with comment 380074
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-04
Your analysis is correct within the framework you describe in terms of having a large problem size and applying computing power to that problem.
Alternatively this seems like an ideal platform to run something like Plan 9 where rather than having parts of the problem be distributed the actual functions of the computing environment are distributed, i.e. terminal server, compute server, storage/file server. From that perspective it seems like it might be very functional even if it wasn't the fastest computing platform from a design standpoint.
Member since:
2007-04-20
It doesn't look to be that different from a regular cluster of computers, just on a smaller scale. Distributed computing is not new and before you start implementing hardware, you need to figure out what software tools/techniques are going to be suitable. At the moment programmers struggle to make full use of current multicore processors. Programming languages and operating systems need to be redesigned from bottom up before you can effectively redistribute your processing over 1000s of cores/processors.
I do feel that starting with tiny distributed processing cells is the wrong way to go. The cost is higher and the overhead of communication and synchronisation will negate any gains of distributed processing. You only go distributed for large problems, that can be broken down into smaller parts.