3 ms·

A friend of mine worked on a project that tried to do distributed RAM temporal storage circa 2005. The company went under because after 4 years 6 engineers coul

A friend of mine worked on a project that tried to do distributed RAM temporal storage circa 2005. The company went under because after 4 years 6 engineers couldn't get it to reliably work even though they controlled most of the participating machines. This is a very hard problem.

anonymousDan 12y ago
"RAM temporal storage" - what exactly do you mean by temporal storage? I've never heard the term before.
- copsarebastards 12y ago
  Basically the idea is to do long-term storage in short-term memory (RAM) by distributing the storage across many machines. One one machine you shouldn't store stuff you want stored long-term in short-term memory (RAM) because as soon as the short-term memory loses power the data is gone. RAM temporal storage attempts to mitigate this problem by duplicating the data across many many machines so that if one machine powers off, the other machines still have the data. This is sort of a holy grail of distributed computing because it could allow people to elastically donate their storage similarly to how people donate their CPU cycles to Folding@Home or GPU cycles to BTC mining. The idea is that a lot of your CPU cycles (for example) are wasted because you aren't doing anything on your computer, so you can donate those cycles to Folding@Home. You could do something similar with RAM, but RAM is different: if I decide to run a program and start using my CPU cycles again Folding@Home can just push computation to another machine. But if I decide to reclaim RAM from a distributed computing system to run a program on my machine, then whatever the system was storing in RAM is lost, and if they need that, they a) need to have it duplicated elsewhere, and b) need to know how to retrieve it efficiently from a network of computers any of which may or may not actually have the data. This has proven to be a very hard problem to solve in practice.

anonymousDan 12y ago

"RAM temporal storage" - what exactly do you mean by temporal storage? I've never heard the term before.

copsarebastards 12y ago
Basically the idea is to do long-term storage in short-term memory (RAM) by distributing the storage across many machines. One one machine you shouldn't store stuff you want stored long-term in short-term memory (RAM) because as soon as the short-term memory loses power the data is gone. RAM temporal storage attempts to mitigate this problem by duplicating the data across many many machines so that if one machine powers off, the other machines still have the data. This is sort of a holy grail of distributed computing because it could allow people to elastically donate their storage similarly to how people donate their CPU cycles to Folding@Home or GPU cycles to BTC mining. The idea is that a lot of your CPU cycles (for example) are wasted because you aren't doing anything on your computer, so you can donate those cycles to Folding@Home. You could do something similar with RAM, but RAM is different: if I decide to run a program and start using my CPU cycles again Folding@Home can just push computation to another machine. But if I decide to reclaim RAM from a distributed computing system to run a program on my machine, then whatever the system was storing in RAM is lost, and if they need that, they a) need to have it duplicated elsewhere, and b) need to know how to retrieve it efficiently from a network of computers any of which may or may not actually have the data. This has proven to be a very hard problem to solve in practice.