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One Computer to Rule Them All

Posted by samzenpus on Thu Feb 07, 2008 07:53 AM
from the and-in-the-queue-bind-them dept.
Supercomputing IBM
An anonymous reader writes "IBM has published a research paper describing an initiative called Project Kittyhawk, aimed at building "a global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application." Nicholas Carr describes the paper with the words "Forget Thomas Watson's apocryphal remark that the world may need only five computers. Maybe it needs just one." Here is the original paper."
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Submission: One computer to rule them all by Anonymous Coward
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  • Yeah, right... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Yetihehe (971185) on Thursday February 07 2008, @07:56AM (#22332248)
    Not gonna happen. One computer - one organization as the power. Does all corporations use gmail? No. The ssame with OSCPW (One Super Computer Per World).

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by tritonman (998572)
      Hell, even gmail isn't hosted all on one computer. This has to be the dumbest thing that I've ever heard. Who ever heard of a global network becoming an "application" hosted on one computer? What planet are these people from?

      • Re:Yeah, right... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MoralHazard (447833) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:12AM (#22332358)
        If you'd bothered to even finish reading the summary (let alone the article), you would have noticed the key word: SHARED. Nobody's talking about hosting this all on one physical computer any more than Gmail is hosted on one physical computer. Both setups are distributed clusters of smaller computers.

        At which point you start to see were IBM's idea actually make sense--they are talking about building a worldwide, distributed, networked collection of cooperating computers... HEY, that sounds an awful lot like the Internet!!

        (I swear, the comment quality on Slashdot gets more and more like YouTube every day.)

        • Re:Yeah, right... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by somersault (912633) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:36AM (#22332526) Homepage Journal

          At which point you start to see were IBM's idea actually make sense--they are talking about building a worldwide, distributed, networked collection of cooperating computers... HEY, that sounds an awful lot like the Internet!!
          That's what I was thinking. Have they applied for a patent for this system, by any chance? ;)
        • I did read the article. IBM is talking about running it on a Blue Gene type of machine.
          The Blue Gene is sort of a cluster in a box but it isn't what your talking about.
          Maybe they think a cluster of Blue Gene's might be what they are thinking of.
          I doubt that they are planing replacing the Internet with one machine but a Blue Gene might replace Google's cluster. It might even be cheaper, faster, user less power, and be easier to manage. IBM has decades of experience making systems that have up times of years

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Courageous (228506)
            I doubt that they are planing replacing the Internet with one machine but a Blue Gene might replace Google's cluster.

            Not at anywhere near the cost.

            C//

    • Re:Yeah, right... (Score:5, Funny)

      by yiantsbro (550957) on Thursday February 07 2008, @07:59AM (#22332294)
      I've seen this movie--and both sequels. It doesn't work out so well for us humans in the end.

      • Re:Yeah, right... Indeed (Score:5, Funny)

        by cytg.net (912690) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:12AM (#22332364)
        And just for that very same reason, i suggest we implement a kill switch ..
        a kill switch like..hmm..how about : whatcouldpossiblegowrong ??
        agreed then. Thank you for participating.

        • Re:Yeah, right... Indeed (Score:5, Interesting)

          by rucs_hack (784150) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:39AM (#22332548)
          In the eighties I read a short story where they built a massive computer to answer the question 'is there a god'.

          They turned it on, and got the answer 'there is now'.

          Fiction yes, but it was musing on the problem of relience on a single solution to a big problem (being in that case a question, but implying a deeper relience on computers, such that this solution was conceived in the first place). What if the single solution fails, or doesn't do what you want?

          I'm not into beleiving in an AI taking over the world if we rely ever more on centralised computing. I'm more into the idea of a powerful AI that we rely on deciding it doesn't want to do what we fancy, and deciding to leave (you can go a long way if you don't need oxygen). If that happened, we'd be fucked.

    • Re:Yeah, right... (Score:5, Funny)

      by PopeRatzo (965947) * on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:26AM (#22332468) Homepage Journal
      All I can say is they better use a really big UPS.

  • Good idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stjobe (78285) on Thursday February 07 2008, @07:56AM (#22332252) Homepage
    Putting all of your eggs in one basket always seemed like a good idea...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Nivex (20616)
      RAII (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Intarwebs) :)

    • Putting all of your eggs in one basket always seemed like a good idea...
      Oh, I'm sure a massive supercomputer design from a company with the large-scale computing experience of IBM would be far from putting all your eggs in one basket. Have you ever worked on IBM mainframe equipment? This stuff has redundancies up the wazoo -- everything from multiple redundant power paths to multiple redundant CPUs and mainboards. You know how everyone brags about Linux servers have "three 9s" uptime? Screw "three 9s". IBMs large-scale computers have -- for all intents and purposes -- 100% uptime. This is why banks and financial institutions and governments and militaries rely on such machines -- because when you need it to run all the time and never go down, you get a mainframe. IBM's supercomputers are no different in that respect.

    • "Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket. See also KISS Principle, elegant.

      I'd say that IBM knows how to build a pretty reliable basket..

      http://catb.org [catb.org]

      • "Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane."


        Wrong analogy. Having two single engine airplanes cuts your chances that all your airplanes will be grounded by engine problems almost in half.

  • Reminds me of 11001001 (Score:5, Informative)

    by nharmon (97591) on Thursday February 07 2008, @07:56AM (#22332254) Homepage
    Having a worldwide master computer really worked for the Bynars [memory-alpha.org]. I'm sure it'll work here on Earth too.
    • That episode was dumb in so many ways.

      They developed a method of talking to each other using 'binary' which sounded a little bit like a 10 baud modem, and we're to believe this is more efficient? They 'evolved' to require that they all work in twos, or they were virtually helpless; this is superior to the ability to work either in a team or alone? They wired themselves into a global computer - this makes some kind of sense? Their global computer's ENTIRE memory could somehow be downloaded into ONE starsh

  • Hosting the entire internet? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dreamchaser (49529) on Thursday February 07 2008, @07:56AM (#22332256) Homepage Journal
    Huh? The Internet is not an application. It's just a big network. Sounds like marketing speak to me.

    Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of Internets! Bah.
    • All the while the Llama loving Stef is promising this to all the clients. Pitir plans to hack the one machine internet and use it to his own ends. The end of the world must be near. Especially with marketing getting involved.

  • The Internet isn't working! (Score:5, Funny)

    by sd.fhasldff (833645) on Thursday February 07 2008, @07:56AM (#22332258)
    Now that old standard user complaint might actually become true!

  • Hello Multivac! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Megane (129182) on Thursday February 07 2008, @07:56AM (#22332260)

    Maybe Asimov was right after all?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivac [wikipedia.org]

  • So basically... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AltGrendel (175092) <ag-slashdotNO@SPAMexit0.us> on Thursday February 07 2008, @07:57AM (#22332274) Homepage
    ...they are going to patent the Storm Worm computer virus.
  • Let's see how many references to The Matrix we get in the comments...

  • Maybe it does need just one... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gary W. Longsine (124661) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:00AM (#22332300) Homepage Journal
    plus a hot spare, off-site.

  • One OS to rule them all (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:07AM (#22332332)

    Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows CD. To my astonishment and distress he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned it on. I was upset because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold and it seemed to have become thicker and heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, in lines finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:

    4F6E65204F5320746F2072756C65207468656D20616C6C2C204F6E65204F5320746F 2066696E64207468656D2C0D0A4F6E65204F5320746F206272696E67207468656D20 616C6C20616E6420696E20746865206461726B6E6573732062696E64207468656D

    'I cannot read the fiery letters,' I said.

    'No,' he said, 'but I can. The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:'

    One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
    One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

  • And according to a Microsoft press release, they feel confident that there are key indicators signaling IBM's adoption of Vista for the new supercomputer.

  • Article Summary (Score:4, Informative)

    by dachshund (300733) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:15AM (#22332388)
    Basically this is a puff piece for IBM, talking up how their Blue Gene SMP systems can run Apache and Linux, so big clients should all run out and buy those rather than clustering inexpensive hardware. The "one computer, running the Internet as an application" thing is a meaningless hook to draw readers in (and get a little bit of attention on places like Slashdot).

    In real life there may be a case to be made for IBM's solution. But making that case has more to do with actually convincing large customers that IBM is substantially cheaper (and runs the software people need). Since that doesn't seem to be happening on a massive scale, I tend to doubt IBM's hype.

  • We will ask this question (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna (970587) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:17AM (#22332404) Journal
    Can the entropy of the universe be reversed? will be the question we will be asking this computer.

  • Phython! (Score:5, Funny)

    by bunratty (545641) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:24AM (#22332450)
    I'm glad they're forward-looking enough to implement Phython, the best of PHP and Python in one language. Maybe next year they can implement Pherlthon?
  • Why do I feel a hyperspace bipass coming on?
  • The internet was invented as a military network to survive even the loss of one land. Dumb, if the only internet server is in exactly this land. Redundancy is absolutley wanted, to support the internet to stay alive.

  • Reinventing torrents? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stan Vassilev (939229) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:32AM (#22332500) Homepage
    I can't wait to be submit my credit card, using my e-banking or book airline tickets, to a bunch of random desktop machines hosting a distributed web application.

    I'm using edge cases? I'm being biased? Well, here's how IBM describes their project: "Such a computer would be capable of hosting not only individual web-scale workloads but the entire Internet."

    The *entire* Internet is vastly more complex and demanding on its *backend* than its *frontend* reveals. What can be hosted entirely on a distributed network of desktop machines precludes many trusted and secure online transactions we make use of in the Internet today. It's obvious from the get go, that this will be only usable for a limited subset of online applications (like, hosting Wikipedia for ex.?) , but I guess making overly broad statements caught the eye of some bloggers and journalists.

  • A free link to the original paper (Score:4, Informative)

    by bo-eric (263735) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:38AM (#22332540)
    ...TFA gives it as http://weather.ou.edu/~apw/projects/kittyhawk/kittyhawk.pdf [ou.edu]

  • Just like mine (Score:5, Funny)

    by The-Bus (138060) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:41AM (#22332562) Homepage
    It'll store all the internet?

    Wonderful. Then, just like my computer, I estimate the data it contains to be about 70% porn.

  • Recursion (Score:5, Funny)

    by webrunner (108849) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:41AM (#22332566) Homepage Journal
    What happens when they put it on the Internet, and then has to also serve itself?

  • TRON (Score:3, Funny)

    by drago (1334) on Thursday February 07 2008, @08:47AM (#22332604)
    ...and can we call it MCP, please? :-)
    • "SYRINX"

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2112_(song) [wikipedia.org]

      We've taken care of everything
      The words you hear, the songs you sing
      The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes
      It's one for all and all for one
      We work together, common sons
      Never need to wonder how or why

      We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx
      Our great computers fill the hallowed halls

      Although the logo of SYRINX is "red, not blue" ;-)

  • Oh the Irony (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Arancaytar (966377) <arancaytar.ilyaran@gmail.com> on Thursday February 07 2008, @10:27AM (#22333862) Homepage
    Considering that the Internet's very definition is (in theory) a "network that is resistant to point attacks by virtue of being decentralized", sure, let's move back to the central server architecture. That is progress.

    Also, this is wonderful because it means we only need to protect a single computer from being monitored by the various US agencies. Oh wait...
    • Oooh.. that's really scary! I bet they were built from secret tax money that is somehow not registered in the budget as well, but also somehow magically gets deducted from your pay. In secret.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by datapharmer (1099455)
        Kind of. It is registered in the tax roles, it just can't be accounted for once it is dispersed: "The Department of Defense... once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions..." according to a Government Accountability office "A study by the Defense Department's inspector general found that the Pentagon couldn't properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent." -sfgate [sfgate.com]

        Maybe they are bu
          • Forbin: "The computer center contains over one-hundred thousand remote sensors and communication devices which monitor all electronic transmissions, such as microwave, laser, radio and television communications, data communications from satellites in orbit all over the world. ... Colossus works completely without human aid. We make no secret of where Colossus is located nor do we intend to conceal how it functions. ... Colossus does have its own defense. It is its own defense. In case of an attack on any of

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