Distributed Computing Economics

The paper Distributed Computing Economics considers the relative costs of computing resources and the implications this has for distributed system design. Today there is rough price parity between (1) one database access, (2) ten bytes of network traffic, (3) 100,000 instructions, (4) 10 bytes of disk storage, and (5) a megabyte of disk bandwidth. This has implications for how one structures Internet-scale distributed computing: one puts computing as close to the data as possible in order to avoid expensive network traffic. If there is time, the talk will then cover what the architecture we are evolving for the World-Wide Telescope -- a federation of the worlds' astronomy data as a collection of web services accessed via portals.