> But for grids (instead of clusters), the communication will become much much
> bigger - I'd like to study that carefully one day, I have no clear idea of
> what is possible.
>
> A trouble is that on grids (at least the ones I've seen) there are often
> faults. We'll have to be fault tolerant I guess.
I've been somewhat on the fence for grids, but that is mainly because
computer scientists are at least as intelligent as Monte-Carlo playouts:
if adding "grid" to a project increases its chances of getting funding,
then "grid" will be added to the project, no matter how; and for a while,
that was exactly what happened - "grid this" and "grid that" everywhere..
However, while browsing papers like
"Toward Third Generation Internet Desktop Grids"
http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00148923/en/
isn't quite as fascinating as reading about the newest Go programming
techniques, it doesn't sound entirely hopeless, either. And isn't INRIA
nearby for some of you? If not, I'm sure that some funding agency in
your neighbourhood decided to steer research toward grid research
long ago;-)
Perhaps some of you Go engine authors could give some of those
Grid researchers a challenge - they have the hardware, the software,
and the need to research grid issues to justify their funding.
And you have the application that might be able to use all that. Unless
they think that their tools can't handle your requirements, they should be
quite interested in participating in your publicity ("beyond blue gene",
"the final man-machine intelligence challenge", and all that;-), not to
mention demonstrating that their tools can handle well-known-to-
be-tough problems. The genuine researchers among them will even
want to figure out how to address the research issues you raise.
Since netlag has been an issue even for slow human games over
internet servers, I'm sure it is going to be an issue here. But that
doesn't mean it is going to be insurmountable (as long as the
whole grid doesn't sit behind the same microwave transmitter;-).
Claus
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