[computer-go] Pay-as-you-go cluster?

[Mark Boon]

On 10/1/06, Darren Cook <darren at dcook.org> wrote:
> For many of us a cluster is just not practical: even if we could afford
> 100 computers, where to put them, and how to meet the power
> requirements. But if you have a scalable algorithm then it may be nice
> to have 100 machines for just the couple of hours of a tournament.
>
> If I've read the following correctly, you can get 100 1.75GHz computers
> of power for 2 hours for a total of $20:
>   http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011
>
> Do I sound like their salesman? :-) Actually I'm just curious if there
> is a catch (*), or if anyone is experimenting with this, or knows of
> competitors.
>
> Darren
>
> *: My guess is that as it is aimed at web hosting they're not expecting
> a CPU-bound application?

$10 per hour is going to add up of course. Occasionally my thoughts
wander to a really distributed Go program, where you can use the power
of idle computers a la SETI.

But these systems are coming to the home faster than you may think.
There are already 2 CPUs in both my iMac and MacBook, 4CPU machines
will be common next year. Sony's next Playstation will have 7 or 8
CPUs, although a different architecture. So it's worth thinking about
these things. Will I have a hundred CPUs around the house in a decade?
Not unthinkable.

The difficulty is chopping up the work in big enough chunks to make it
worthwhile to do the communication with all the computers. And take
into account the different speeds with which they can communicate, as
the 2 cores in my Macs will communicate much faster than with each
other than with another computer.

I think a lot of exciting possibilities lie in wait for us here, but
it's going to take time to develop the ideas and algorithms. As usual,
the software will lag behind the hardware.

Mark