The idea of metacomputing is very promising as it enables the use of a network of many independent computers as if they were one large parallel machine, or virtual supercomputer at a fraction of the cost of traditional supercomputers.
While traditional virtual machines (e.g. clusters) have been designed for local area networks, the exponential growth in Internet connectivity allows this concept to be applied on a much larger scale. This, coupled with the fact that desktop PCs (personal computers) in corporate and home environments are heavily underutilized – typically only one-tenth of processing power is used – has given rise to interest in harnessing these unused CPU cycles of desktop PCs connected over the Internet.
This new paradigm has been dubbed as peer-to-peer (P2P) computing, which is being recently called enterprise desktop grid computing. Although the notion of desktop grid computing is simple enough, the practical realization of a peer-to-peer grid poses a number of challenges. Some of the key issues include: heterogeneity, resource management, failure management, reliability, application composition, scheduling and security. Further, for wide-scale adoption, desktop grid computing infrastructure must also leverage the power of Windows-class machines since the vast majority of desktop computers run variants of the Windows operating system.
Source: University of Melbourne
Authors: Akshayl | Raj | Rranjan | Srikumar