Economics of Distributed Computing

Jim Gray of Microsoft Research has an interesting paper on the economic viability of distributed computing.

Some quotes:

“Put the computation near the data. The recurrent theme of this analysis is that “On Demand” computing is only economical for very CPU-intensive (100,000 instructions per byte or a CPU-day per gigabyte of network traffic) applications.”

“If telecom prices drop faster than Moore’s law … [snip] … it could completely alter the arguments here. But there is no obvious sign of that occurring.”