At least that is what my mother told me. Apparently the computer gurus of the world believe that as well. Last year Virginia Tech introduced System X. System X is VT's new supercomputer that surpised the high performance computing world by placing 3 in the Fall 2003 worldwide rankings of supercomputers. The surprise was VT had not previously place anywhere in these rankings. System X is a cluster of 1100 dual processor G5 Macintosh computers and cost VT little over 5 million dollars to build. When you consider that the 1st and 2nd ranked super computers and many of the computers ranked below System X cost over 100 million dollars this is quite amazing. What makes it possible is the cooperation of those 2200 desktop processors.
In the news these days is a new technology called BitTorrent...
BitTorrent uses cooperation of many computers on the web to allow the download of very large files. With normal download programs you are transfering a file from one computer to another. If it is a large file those two computers must maintain that communcations for a very long time. For a CD's worth of data we are talking hours. For a DVD's worth of data even longer. If multiple people want the same file the computer supplying the file must share its time between each user that wants the file. It does not take many requesters before the process grinds to a halt. With BitTorrent the downloaders share the effort. The source computer passes out a little of the file at the time to requesters but the requesters also know about the other requesters and they begin sharing the pieces that they have received with each other. The sharing is prioritized so that each requester attempts to get the rarest pieces first. As a result the rare pieces are passed around and soon they are not rare. By cooperating the process makes sure that no computer becomes overwhelmed and everyone gets the file. By cooperating gets something that no one computer could accomplish by itself. For a more detailed explaination try this Wired article or BitTorrents 101. And think about how cooperation could apply to your products. How can a lot of small processes or devices accomplish what one large device cannot and usually at a significant savings.