Thursday, April 22, 2010

Is that a workable idea ?

Actually, we are waiting for a new server to be installed and any new physical server installation takes some time, we all know that. The project would request it, there would be financials and then the order would be approved internally.
It would be placed with the vendor by purchasing, the vendor will ship it, and then a few days/weeks after, technicians will come over to install the stuff.

Then the local admins will get to work and configure it to be used by the respective teams. Another few days/weeks...

Just wondering, any given enterprise has hundreds ir not thousands computers, all classes, laptops, desktop development PCs, server class PCs and others...

How about taking off 10% of all these PCs' computing power to create a cloud computing environment (of course within the company environment only). An application can be installed which will make sure that a given percentage of computing power will go to only a particular resource.

A lot like how BOINC works. You install a client/manager app on ur PC and then u receive a piece of computation for your part of computing power.

That kind of computing environment can easily replace an average server's computing power.
The storage can easily be hooked up to a SAN.

I'd encourage a discussion on this... see what others think around the idea...

in reference to: Distributed computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (view on Google Sidewiki)

2 comments:

  1. Anything is possible, but we've carefully weigh the tradeoff's. Say the network bandwidth that it's going to consume and also, how many pc's can be shared and how many people are willing to share. -- Vasudev

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  2. Well,

    1. the network will be used only when transmitting packets, not all the time. The model that I am suggesting is not new, just that I am trying to apply it to an enterprise, instead of the world wide web...

    2. As for people's willingness to join in, it wont be optional. Its like an enterprise wide policy, everybody puts in 10% of his PC's computing power towards this.

    And still, there might be other details that I have not looked at in detail, but what I wanted was to initially look at the feasibility of the idea...

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