Distributed Computing Economics

ABSTRACT

Computing economics are changing. Today there is rough price parity between: (1) one database access; (2) 10 bytes of network traffic; (3) 100,000 instructions; (4) 10 bytes of disk storage; and (5) a megabyte of disk bandwidth. This has implications for how one structures Internet-scale distributed computing: one puts computing as close to the data as possible in order to avoid expensive network traffic.

REFERENCES

• 1: This article makes broad statements about the economics of computing. The numbers are fluid (costs change every day). They are approximate to within a factor of 3. For this specific fact: SETI@Home averaged 54 teraflops (floating-point operations/second) on 1/26/2003, handily beating the sum of the combined peak performance of the top four of the Top500 supercomputers registered at http://www.top500.org/ on that day.
• 2: Ian Foster , Carl Kesselman, The grid: blueprint for a new computing infrastructure, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1998
• 3: See http://SkyQuery.net/ and http://TerrraService.net/. Each of these two Web sites acts as a portal to several SOAP Web services.
• 4: The hardware prices are typical of Web prices, the WAN price is typical of rates paid by large (many Gbps/month) Internet service providers. Hardware is depreciated over three years.
• 5: Ferreira, L. et. al. 2002. Introduction to Grid Computing with Globus. IBM Redbook series; http://ibm.com/redbooks.
• 6: Private communication from Gerd Heber, Cornell Theory Center, January 12, 2003.
• 7: Thomas L. Sterling , John Salmon , Donald J. Becker , Daniel F. Savarese, How to build a Beowulf: a guide to the implementation and application of PC clusters, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999
• 8: Private communication from Ed Catmull, Pixar. April 2, 2003.
• 9: Altschul, S.F., Gish W., Miller W., Myers E. W., Lipman D. J. 1990. Basic local alignment search tool. Journal of Molecular Biology 215: 403-410; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/ and http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/commofinterest/compbio/pdf/parcel_blast.pdf for a large BLAST task.
• 10: Smith, T.F., Waterman, M.S. 1981. Identification of common molecular subsequences. Journal of Molecular Biology 147: 195-197.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Commercial services

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services