Next Big Breakthrough on the Internet

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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Since the early days of computing scientists have wanted to use parallel processing to attack large problems.  It's a divide and conqueror technique.

Most problems are solved sequentially step by step, computation by computation.  It's very hard to break up a  problem and distribute it to remote computers and assemble the solution at the end.

The tools that Computer Scientists use called Compilers don't really integrate parallel processes very well, especially if the problem is to be handled over the world wide net.

It would be very good to have available a big chunk of the Internet to solve certain problems.   Chunks are very difficult to program and some problems are by their very nature sequential.

Lots of programs have been developed that use idle machine time on the net, but very few use multiple computers efficiently.  The trick is to divide the work so that one computer is not waiting on another's results.

The weather is an area that the use of parallel processing will assist.  If you had 1000s of computers trying to simulate the weather, it would be better than just a few super computers.  The trick is how to do it?

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22/07/2009 01:29 AM

Chess playing machines can use parallel processing as various computers run down move chains to pick the best next move.  Even this is troublesome.

Other area of interests might be fluid flow and large scale simulation of ocean currents based upon moment to moment data acquisition.

Right now I'd have to bet on Google coming up with the first commercial use of large scale total net processing.  Some of their artificial intelligence endeavors might lend themselves to parallel flow of computation and data. 

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