The grid, 29 hours in.

Well, it has been 29 hours since I first started up the grid. As the backend dishes out work it also records some basic statistics about the amount of work being done. Probably the most relevant is the number of work uploads that have taken place at specific time intervals. The graph below shows the number of work uploads each our since we went live.

That isn’t terribly impressive and we aren’t anywhere near reaching the computational power of a single desktop computer yet. A big part of the problem is that my program isn’t particularly efficient from a distributed algorithm point of view. The most expensive operation is sending data across the network, and in our case the network is the entire network. In order to nullify the effect of the network inbetween the nodes and the central site the processing that is done at the node needs to exceed the cost of actually sending and receiving the piece of work from it.

I’m working on making the algorithm more computationally intensive on the browser end, but I obviously need to be careful about the impact that has on the browser user.