Stephen Guerin wrote:
Scalable eventually to on the order of a million agents per
Internet-connected device. An order of magnitude less for mobile
phones and a few more for beefy servers. So maybe, I don't know, 10^9
devices * 10^6 agents/device = 10^15 agents.
Hmm. Mobile phones will have most of their low latency memory in use.
Writing the larger flash memory over and over would soon degrade it, not
to mention be relatively slow. But suppose one agent consumed 1000 bytes
and there is 25 meg RAM free, then you might get as many as 10k agents
in phone RAM with the other half of that memory for their shared
simulation landscape or whatever. Mobile processor power keeps going
down and batteries getting better.. A least in Santa Fe, I'm not
terribly optimistic about wireless network performance. Where's the
3G, AT&T?
This will most likely be written on top of existing http and ftp
protocols. We want to move away from the current 3-tier, (database,
business rules, UI) application development where objects/agents are
disconnected from their databases and their interfaces. With migrating
Javascript objects between server, phone, browser and other
visualization front ends (Unity, Flash, Rhino/Processing, etc), we see
the potential to make a more seamless application development
environment.
I guess you mean to remove the word "their"? Fast access to data is the
limiting factor for most computation -- processors are fast but memory
and I/O are not (and mobile phone networks definitely are not). That's
why supercomputers have as much money in network infrastructure as they
do in processors.
Anyone know if there is an iPhone app for distributed memory? Such
that by running it, memory is distributed over millions of them in some
sort of distributed public key encryption, but that it's only necessary
to be able to reach a small fraction of them to associate a key with a
value? I see that BitTorrent was rejected by Apple:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/apple-rejects-bittorrent-iphone-app/
Marcus
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