Brain Murmurs

The idea behind JIVA are really not new: use the idle time of computers that you already own to solve supercomputing problems. If you have access to a lot of computers that are primarily used only during regular working hours you can use those machines to perform parallel computations.

I will try and illustrate the scenario using a concrete example.

I used to work at Lockheed Martin Astronautics. The company had about 8,000 employees, and it is probably safe to say that of those 8,000 at least 4,000 of them used desktop computers during the day.

At night time these computers were either turned off or they just sat and burned electricity. Only a few of them actually did any work over night.

Within our own flight software group we had a fellow that needed to run Monte Carlo simulations, and had a dedicated beowulf cluster built with 20 computers. The cluster ran around the clock.

LMA could easily use a product like JIVA. They can install the client on all of their desktop computers, and then the people that need to use those computers, like my friend in flight software, can write the simulations that need to be run on the JIVA clients at night. Instead of running on 20 machines around the clock he might be able to finish the run in a few days by sending the work out to the LMA corporate JIVA network.

In many senses the network would just be a modern version of the old supercomputers from the sixties, where people had to queue up for time on the mainframe.

-Daniel

Filed under: JIVA, Uncategorized by Administrator