Decentralised Computing

Grid, Peer to Peer and Web Services,

Whilst the internet and corporate intranets allow arbitrary machines to communicate directly with each other, it is only recently that this potential has begun to be exploited in the delivery of new applications, or novel ways to exploit the resources at ‘the edge of the network’.

The prevailing paradigm of client-server application deployment means that applications have a central point of failure and face scalability limitations based on server capacity. The scope of function of the application must be anticipated in advance. It also demands the dedication of significant resources - hardware, maintenance and administration costs – before the application can function, imposing thresholds to adoption.

Decentralised deployment strategies such as ‘peer-to-peer’ suffer less from the failure of individual units and avoid many scalability problems. They also offer an opportunity to exploit the resources of desktop machines which would otherwise remain largely idle. Additional services such as grid computing capabilities, realtime communication and collaborative working support can also be considered when applications are hosted directly on the user’s machine.

ArchiveResearch: DIET