On the hunt for a truly distributed global supercomputer

Large scale computing is an important and growing part of modern life. It has applications in many areas including the rendering of videos, analysis of data about extraterrestrial life, design of proteins, discovery of cryptocurrency, simulation of physical or engineering systems, and a myriad of other applications. Most large scale computing platforms are limited to one general model. In this model, a single actor controls large amounts of computational resources. Users submit jobs to the resource, which then manages the actual allocation of computation to the job. Large scale services like Amazon or Google computing centers use this model. In this workshop we will discuss this computational model and compare it to an alternative swarm-based model. A swarm may be thought of as a communicating group of agents whose capabilities together exceed those of the individual agents, even when acting individually in parallel. A swarm-based fully distributed computational model has many advantages over centralized models. Students will explore these advantages through an interactive activity