{"id":649,"date":"2006-01-16T00:02:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-16T09:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/17\/when-grid-is-effective-narrow-pipes-huge-skulls\/"},"modified":"2013-03-15T21:42:15","modified_gmt":"2013-03-16T06:42:15","slug":"513659","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/16\/513659\/","title":{"rendered":"When grid is effective: narrow pipes, huge skulls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><P>It&#8217;s like <A href=\"http:\/\/www.ieeetcsc.org\/content\/tfcc-5-1-gray.shtml\">Jim says<\/A>: &#8220;<STRONG>The ideal mobile task is stateless (needs no database or database access), has a tiny network input and output, and has huge computational demand<\/STRONG>&#8220;. That&#8217;s why <A href=\"mailto:SETI@home\">SETI@home<\/A> was such a good idea. However, I believe that the new NASA stunt is even more interesting. Check it out <A href=\"http:\/\/www.planetary.org\/programs\/projects\/innovative_technologies\/stardustathome\/stardustathome_story.html\">here<\/A>, but in short the story goes as follow:<\/P><br \/>\n<UL><br \/>\n<LI>the Stardust project produced a HUGE amount of data<\/LI><br \/>\n<LI>the information they are searching for is not easy to spot by automatic means<\/LI><\/UL><br \/>\n<P>So they came out with a crossing between <A href=\"mailto:SETI@home\">SETI@home<\/A> and <A href=\"http:\/\/www.researchbuzz.org\/2005\/12\/amazons_mechanical_turk.shtml\">Amazon&#8217;s Mechanical Turk<\/A> (another very smard idea, if you ask me): in the coming months NASA will make available an app,&nbsp;with which&nbsp;volounteers will be able to easily spot the interesting samples just by watching small 40-frames movies. While the data may not be actually tiny, they will be certainly comparable to all the animated banners &amp; rich content we are now used to deal with; and I have an hard time imagining something more computationally demanding than something that can&#8217;t be crunched without a between-the-ears CPU&#8230; <\/P><br \/>\n<P>NASA rightfully declares that the competence of each user is non-trivial to assess, so they will resort on some sort of voting system: every sample will be sent out to 4 users, and it will be considered only if 2 of them will agree. It&#8217;s interesting to note the underlying assumption of good faith of the users, which basically makes something like those systems possible at all. While it&#8217;s true that nobody would have an interest in clicking everything at random, I&#8217;ve seen too many ruined monuments &amp; broken public phones to think that we are just PLB (perfectly logical beings) trying to figure out the color of the gem on our forehead&#8230; I still think that the vast, vaaast&nbsp;majority of users will make the right thing (why bother to register at all, otherwise?). However I also think that it&#8217;s too easy to forget how this trust dramaticly simplify an otherwise very hard problem: when collaborative efforts are used for revenue generation activities, this kind of trust can be a luxury. And the effort for securing effectively the whole thing can sometimes quickly erode the other advantages that lured you in the adventure&#8230;<\/P><\/p>\n<div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s like Jim says: &#8220;The ideal mobile task is stateless (needs no database or database access), has a tiny network input and output, and has huge computational demand&#8220;. That&#8217;s why SETI@home was such a good idea. However, I believe that the new NASA stunt is even more interesting. Check it out here, but&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,110,109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture-ws","category-grid","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1831,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions\/1831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}