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June 29, 2003

my.super.com

The project I've been working on is rather amazing in several ways, but the one way I want to comment on is the demand that it has put on our database servers for some very processor intensive work.

Once upon a time a company named Britton Lee did with the client server model something that has almost been forgotton, which is to make server hardware task oriented. Most computers we love and use are general purpose machines. And although the chipsets in personal computers have evolved to make their motherboards very attuned to paying attention to human needs, most chip architectures in the machines we use are not designed with certain software tasks in particular in mind.

This is odd considering how much of the business done by large databases is predictable. I am confident that the architects of DB2 and Oracle have optimized their offerings to work in highly efficient ways on every computing platform for which they are offered. But this still doesn't change the fact that more often than not, our appetite for speed in processing queries that matter to us exceeds the hardware available for the task. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just push a 'turbo' button and reroute our task to the really big iron instead of the measly $500,000 8 way box we are using?

The alternative to having a real hardware database server is to have a larger general purpose machine available to handle very large tasks on demand in a shared pool. This is the attractiveness of the promise of grid computing. In specialized areas, such as datawarehousing the market possibilities are great.

Recall that only a decade ago, most of the corporate appetite for marketing or sophisticated business intelligence data was outsourced to service bureaus. Often a consortium or industry segment would provide data collected by individual organizations and submit them to a group like MSA. MSA would then process that collected data for a fee and resell it in a digested or expanded form back to the industry.

But since the rise of client/server and UNIX in the corporate sphere, IT departments have been taking back that market, upgrading and expanding their own compute resources and building their own systems. Speaking from my own experience, most of the work in this space has been handled by high paid consultants and consulting organizations. Implementing these systems has been difficult, but the appetite remains great. Enabling companies to close their financial books and distribute results globally in 5 days instead of 45 is a common goal in large organizations. This puts enormous stress on systems at peak periods.

Handling this cyclical demand by leasing space on mammoth systems can prove to be very efficient for purchasers of IT infrastructure and grid systems providers as well. This is where we should expect to see the promise of grid computing delivered.

Posted by mbowen at June 29, 2003 08:51 PM

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