From: nigel@rs733.GSFC.NASA.Gov
Subject: Re: Shadowrun: Controlling magicians
Organization: Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md, USA
	<1992Apr9.143305.24786@u.washington.edu>
	<NIGEL.92Apr9172259@rs733.GSFC.NASA.Gov>
	<RATINOX.92Apr13214022@splinter.coe.northeastern.edu>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 17:49:46 GMT

In article <RATINOX.92Apr13214022@splinter.coe.northeastern.edu> ratinox@meceng.coe.northeastern.edu (Richard Pieri/Stainless Steel Rat) writes:

>>>>>> On 9 Apr 92 22:22:59 GMT, nigel@rs733.GSFC.NASA.Gov said:

[my stuff about the Matrix being a massive distributed processing system]

>This isn't as bogus as you suppose. It's called ``distributed processing''
>and is fundamental to operating systems that function under the priciples
>of ``Amobea.'' Simply put, you tell your machine to do something. It then
>splits the task up into smaller tasks, and sends out querys to other
>machines on the network--machines that are free are capable of responding,
>and do so. When your machine gets a reply, it tells that remote node to
>process a subtask and send the results back.

The problem lies in how you manage the parallelism and which parts to
export.  The assumption is that computing by this period has hit some
physical boundry that is exceedingly hard to crack...on the other hand
by the time you reach this mythical bundry you've got an awful number
MIPS available anyway.  The deal is that many of the tasks you simply
would not want to ship off site because the transmission time probably
exceeds wating around for the current task to finish and doing the
queued task.

>A similar technique is used in the massively parallel systems being
>developed. It's also how your brain works, if you think about it a bit.

Most MPP and distributed systems (as far as the little literature I've
seen) usually has the systems physically close (especially MPP...the
new ones combine all the CPUs on a wafer if I read the blurb right).

This minimizes the time it takes the information to return to the
controlling CPU.  For the matrix to really be able to work this way
you need either near instantaneous communication to at least a few
sites (say everyone in your zone) or huge bandwidth and easily
partitioned subsections to be processed.  The first is somewhat
unlikely given that the speed of light is your limit and the second is
possible but I don't know enough about how MPP systems work to tell if
that would fly.  

My assumption is that transmission rates would be very high but still
take thousands if not millions of CPU cycles to go across the city.
We'll assume for the moment that the path is some massive parallel
connection and for each network clock cycle a sufficiently large
packet is transfered.

The reason that we see a decent increases with the current distributed
systems (what sun?) is that the processing capability is pretty low
anyway (on the order of tens of MIPS...some of which is automatically
burned reading net news ;-)...they are only workstations...  but you
end up with a total of more power (and disk space).  The other systems
(like SGI powersystems) slide additional CPUs onto a clean and fast
backplane - not ethernet or whatever.

[more stuff deleted]

>It also brings up a point for having ``black'' research machines linked to
>the Matrix. Research into those kinds of things would require truely
>massive amounts of processing power, possibly more than the corp could
>afford to have in-house. So non-sensitive calculations would be farmed out,

That was my theory...and it also explains why deckers have such an
easy time of it.  These days to hack into the system you have to steal
a password, find a back door or patch into mail ;-).  In the matrix
everybody is constantly offloading process across the network to
foreign systems and starting remote jobs.  The decker simply has to
simulate one of these network request to gain entry.  After that he or
she can fool the ssytem into granting extra privs for thier process.

As far as deckers go I generally make the deck/decker aggregate appear
as another node on the system.  The deckers matrix persona is shipped
out to the target node to be initiated as a process.  A connection is
maintained between the process and the home deck so that requests for
CPU power to break codes or whatever can be farmed out to the Matrix
as a whole.  

The deck programs exist as firmware cards that are blazingly fast and
dedicated to functioning as high speed controllers for these farmed
out proceses.  What you have in the deck is computing power equivalent
to a serious mainframe but it only can do the things hard coded into
the firmware...kind of a way to reduce size, power and monetary
requirements to own a deck.  

Most amature "deckers" will be using the equvalent to a PC (can you
say meat?) with decking programs in software.  Super pro deckers may
have a supercomputer for a deck allowing much more flexible
capability.  

Decks are primarily used in my world to hit those secure systems after
penetrating physical security (since it much easier to haul around a
deck than a supercomputer).  The downside to this is that I don't
allow the deckers a hacking pool going this way...after all you can't
really do much to firmware.  The upside is that systems off the net
tend to depend more on physical security than system ones.

>while the secret stuff would be done internally. Makes you think of all
>kinds of internal power struggles, as one side says ``isolate us, or we're
>vulnerable'' while the other says ``we need the power of the Matrix to do
>our research.''

Yep...but the real rich guys can afford a few supercomputers.  You get
the rough equivalent in a tight cluster of these guys as you would
gettting cycles from the rest of Seattle...most of those systems are
babies for accounting...just how much CPU capability do you need to
run DBase XXXIX?

>   --Rat

--
Nigel Tzeng
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