© 2007 Craig Henderson
Applications
Typical applications that can benefit from a distributed architecture are those with large storage requirements, high availability and resilience and intensive data processing.
Systems with large storage requirements
Storage is relative cheap with modern technology, but it is always a limited resource. For applications such as Document Management Systems, Content Management Systems and Large scale web-sites such as music and video download sites, a distributed storage infrastructure reduces the impact of these physical barriers by providing a virtual storage which is scalable and reliable beyond a single device. An emerging application that can benefit from the Project Aldeburgh is Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) providing video streaming on demand with ability to pause, rewind, fast-foward, freeze-frame, etc. full-screen high definition (broadcast quality) pictures.
Share resources within corporate networks
Corporate networks contain hundreds and thousands of machines and many (perhaps even most?) of them are significantly under-used, spending a lot of time idle with spare hard disk space. Systems built on a distributed architecture framework like Project Aldeburgh can take advantage of these under utilised resources and increase the efficiency of the organisation overall.
Share resources with trusted friends and family
Home computers are typically even less utilised that corporate machines. A distributed network of trusted friends and family's machines can be mutually benefit to boost computing resources on a low budget.
Community based processing & storage collaboration
Large-scale processing and collaboration projects become more easily achievable if they can be based upon a proven infrastructure providing the technology for distributed computing. There are many projects already available such as Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@Home) that use screensavers to process data when the machine is idle.
This is an exciting area for future development. Web 2.0 has demonstrated the influence of community based collaborations. A technological equivalent is peer-to-peer collaborative processing and storage. There are many peer-to-peer system deas posted on Cambrian House, the self-confessed "home to the world's first crowdsourcing community: a Web 2.0 community that allows businesses or individuals to harness the wisdom and participation of crowds for commercial purposes". A selection are linked below.
 |