Powers Unfiltered

Finance on Windows, a magazine based in the UK, asked me to write an article on grid computing.  I took the opportunity to hammer a few of my favorite themes, mostly based around my own analysis of the economics of distributed computing.  The article is in the May 2007 issue (now being handed out at fine financial events everywhere, or you can subscribe, or you can read it online. 

This topic is near and dear to my heart, and I’ll have a lot more to say about it (here and elsewhere).  The bottom line?  The economics of distributed computing have changed radically over the past few years.  When high-end hardware costs tens of millions of dollars, the costs of programming are small relative to other considerations.  When high-performance distributed computing systems can now be had for orders of magnitude less — the cost of adapting real-world applications to such systems dominates other considerations.