Re: *Real* Distributed Computing

Michael N. Christoff wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone in this group is looking into the theoretical side
> of distributed computing. I keep reading definitions of DC to the effect of
> "DC is a method of computing where one a) breaks a large problem into
> smaller parts, b) distributes the partial workloads to a set of processes
> that compute the partial solutions, c) finally recombines the partial
> solutions into a total solution". ie: SETI, etc...
>
> This is an *example* of distributed computing - a particular, and very
> straight-forward use of many computers, but it is by no means a
> definition of DC.
>
> Does anyone here look into things such as decision tasks (the renaming
> problem, k-set agreement, consensus) or any theoretical papers in the field
> (FLP, the asynchronous computability theorem, the relationship between
> algebraic topology and distributed computing, dihomotopy, ditopological
> homology groups, various calculi for concurrent systems, fine-grained
> concurrency, fault-tolerance, provable impossibility of certain tasks,
> computability in asynchronous, semi-synchronous and synchronous networks,
> worst-case message complexity of distributed tasks, randomized distributed
> algorithms, self-stabilization, shared-memory vs. message passing models,
> fault-tolerance, Byzantine failures, crash failures, omission failures, etc,
> etc, etc...)?

I think there are still lots of unsolved problems. The GRID community
seems to be trying straightforward applications of distributed
computing, but
I think you are really interested in parallel distributed computing,
which is something above distributing tasks of an embarrasingly
parallel
program, like SETI.

The true challenge in distributed computing arises when the data sizes
exceed terabytes, and the kind of processing required is on the order
of petaflops, and the data partitioning is not trivial I guess :)

One would like to see more unifying approaches to distributed computing
rather than the lots of small hacks we use today. When I open up a
parallel computing textbook, it feels like a bag of tricks.

Cheers,

--
Eray

.

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