Distributed Computing Software for ISPs? 4
Blowit asks: "I currently work at an ISP and are looking for software to assist companies who need extra computing power for tackling huge data crunching. The goal is to have a client which can have several versions of different computing screen savers which we will bundle with our software to both assist the companies who need the computing power and to subsidize end users Internet costs. Is there a software solution out there that can be offered to ISPs? The subsidizing of end users internet connection costs would be credited by cost per valid unit returned to discourage cheating. The more a client can compile results, the less expensive their internet costs would be, the more likely they would keep their computer on to assist the cause. With the current problems with price bullying with telcos for DSL services and the cost of running a network, any additional subsides can help smaller ISPs to grow and be able to offer more affordable services. Is there distributed computing software out there that will currently pay their users for borrowing time on their computer?"
Several problems... (Score:5)
Most scientific computing code is written in a manner which implicitly assumes low latency. Linpack, for example, needs interprocessor latency on the order of a few microseconds; most other applications require similarly low latencies. Unless you can develop new algorithms which are latency-tolerant and rewrite all the necessary code to implement them, the speed of light will kill you.
As for bandwidth, "huge data crunching" obviously requires moving large amounts of data around. Can your network handle it? Can your network handle it sufficiently cheaply to be practical?
Another issue, of course, is finding interested customers. The idea of having data spread around to any number of unknown people isn't something many companies look forward to. Add to that the question of how rapidly they need results -- using a "keep re-assigning work until it all gets done" scheduler on processors which only complete 80% of the work sent out you'll find that it takes a long time to get jobs finished -- and it will take quite a bit of marketing to find paying customers.
What about Java or inferno (Score:1)
Vendors of Distributed Computing on the Internet (Score:2)
I would suggest trying to work a deal with them in promoting their client on your ISP customers. Their clients can run code from various computationally needy customers. They handle the problems with scheduling, the distribution of jobs, customer relations, etc.
Parabon Computing and United Devices both run customer Java code in the JVM which is installed on every client as part of their client-side application. They can therefore (theoretically) run on Windows/Mac/Unix/etc. I'm pretty sure both have multiple OS clients at this point. Entropia's client, last I checked, could only run on Windows as it uses a Windows specific 'sandbox'. The advantage with Entropia is they can theoretically run all sorts of binary, script, Java code without security problems.
Good luck in setting this up. If you would like some contact numbers for any of these companies, let me know (w s hayes @ mindspring dot com).
sounds like seta@home (Score:2)