> From: Russell Wallace [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 6:45 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It sure seems to me that the availability of cloud computing is > valuable > > to the AGI project. There are some claims that maybe intelligent > programs > > are still waiting on sufficient computer power, but with something > like > > this, anybody who really thinks that and has some real software in > mind > > has no excuse. They can get whatever cpu horsepower they need, I'm > pretty > > sure even to the theoretical levels predicted by, say, Moravec and > > Kurzweil. It takes away that particular excuse. > > Indeed, that's been the most important effect of computing power > limitations. It's not that we've ever been able to say "this program > would do great things, if only we had the hardware to run it". It's > that we learn to flinch away from the good designs, the workable > approaches, because they won't fit on the single cheap beige box we > have on our desks. The key benefit of cloud computing is one that can > be had before the first line of code is written: don't think in terms > of how your design will run on one box, think in terms of how it will > run on 10,000. >
My suspicion though is that say you had 100 physical servers and then 100 physical cloud servers. You could hand tailor your distributed application so that it is extremely more efficient not running on the cloud substrate. Even if you took the grid substrate that the cloud is running on and hand tweaked your app to utilize that I suspect that it would still be way less efficient than a 100% native written. The advantage of using cloud or grid substrate is that it makes writing the application much easier. Hand coded distributed applications take a particular expertise to develop. Eliminating that helps from a bootstrap perspective. Also when you have control over your server you can manipulate topology. It is possible to enhance inter-server communication by creating custom physical and virtual network topology. I assume as grid and cloud computing matures the software substrate will become more efficient and adaptable to the application. To be sure though on the efficiencies, some tests would need to be run. Unless someone here understands cloud/grid enough to know what the deal is or has already run tests. John ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
