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I find it funny that we can now have a super-computer in our pockets, but we still build huge expensive data-centers. I wonder if computation is like roads: The

by z3t4 10y ago

I find it funny that we can now have a super-computer in our pockets, but we still build huge expensive data-centers. I wonder if computation is like roads: The more we can do, the more we need.

javajosh 10y ago
It's a different thing reacting to one person than reacting to a million people, especially when those million people's actions are tightly coupled with each other in a social graph. But if you could fit a million people's state into memory AND also handle a very fast flow of messages at one physical box, well that's probably good enough for government work! But we love stateless, wasteful architectures (wasting server CPU time, memory, and network bandwidth) so that means you need 1000 machines to support 1 million people. (That's not entirely fair since locality also requires some overhead. One machine that supported a million users might be great if all of those people were in one city. But usually that's not the case, so at the very least you need a box in the top 100 cities (by whatever measure, the simplest being population), at least.)
- tajen 10y ago
  Interesting remark. I make the same calculation as yours and I also find that there currently is 1000 servers per million inhabitants on Earth today (between Amazon, Rackspace, MS and DO). In other words, one server serves 1,000 inhabitants. But given that not everyone has access to technology, let alone pay for Cloud services, I've estimated that we've provisioned 1 servers to serve all online services (bank, electricity, govt, OSS, Netflix, Volkswagen software, etc) for 100 citizen in developed areas. It's an extremely bad, resource-intensive architecture ;) The number of servers in private companies might be around 1 per citizen, and the number of processors per human around 100x (incl. mobile phone, tv, smart lamps). Given a proc has 5m transistors and humans have 100m neurons... our architecture is so bad that we're already outnumbered by machines by a factor of 20 at least.
rezistik 10y ago
It's more like we have a terminal for a super computer in our pockets than an actual supercomputer. A lot of a phone's tasks are offloaded on servers.

by z3t4 10y ago

I find it funny that we can now have a super-computer in our pockets, but we still build huge expensive data-centers. I wonder if computation is like roads: The more we can do, the more we need.

javajosh 10y ago

It's a different thing reacting to one person than reacting to a million people, especially when those million people's actions are tightly coupled with each other in a social graph. But if you could fit a million people's state into memory AND also handle a very fast flow of messages at one physical box, well that's probably good enough for government work! But we love stateless, wasteful architectures (wasting server CPU time, memory, and network bandwidth) so that means you need 1000 machines to support 1 million people. (That's not entirely fair since locality also requires some overhead. One machine that supported a million users might be great if all of those people were in one city. But usually that's not the case, so at the very least you need a box in the top 100 cities (by whatever measure, the simplest being population), at least.)

tajen 10y ago
Interesting remark. I make the same calculation as yours and I also find that there currently is 1000 servers per million inhabitants on Earth today (between Amazon, Rackspace, MS and DO). In other words, one server serves 1,000 inhabitants. But given that not everyone has access to technology, let alone pay for Cloud services, I've estimated that we've provisioned 1 servers to serve all online services (bank, electricity, govt, OSS, Netflix, Volkswagen software, etc) for 100 citizen in developed areas. It's an extremely bad, resource-intensive architecture ;) The number of servers in private companies might be around 1 per citizen, and the number of processors per human around 100x (incl. mobile phone, tv, smart lamps). Given a proc has 5m transistors and humans have 100m neurons... our architecture is so bad that we're already outnumbered by machines by a factor of 20 at least.

rezistik 10y ago

It's more like we have a terminal for a super computer in our pockets than an actual supercomputer. A lot of a phone's tasks are offloaded on servers.