What You Can Do With a Cheap CPU

Earlier this week, the front page of The New York Times carried a story by John Markoff about what he calls "flash mob computing," a fancy way of saying that a bunch of kids carried their PCs to a local university gym to set them up on a network and have them act as a cluster of computing nodes.

Back when I was teaching high school networking topics, we called these events LAN parties, and they principally were for the kids to gather together and play network-based games in someone's house. All you needed were plenty of power plugs, a router or a hub, and some space to set everything up.

The whole thing has me flashing back to 1987 when I was at PC Week, and Barry Gerber of UCLA, Jan Newman of Novell and Bill Alderson of Network General got a bunch of IBM PS/2s together to do the first LAN topology tests, running NetWare over Ethernet, Arcnet, and Token Ring (Ethernet won, by the way). What was similar was we had extension cords running all over the UCLA building that we were using for the makeshift staging area, and we kept running out of power plugs, not to mention the fans that we brought in to try to keep the heat pumping out from all those computers from frying us and the equipment, too. Those tests also cemented some solid friendships and professional relationships over the years with Gerber, Newman and Alderson.

But the power and AC requirements notwithstanding, the software is what makes these Dean-like be-ins (I am showing my age, I know) possible. The software to assemble a cluster of computers is fairly well understood by now. A good example includes peer-to-peer products such as SETI-at-home and others than can disassemble a single computing task among hundreds and thousands and even millions of separate machines.

It isn't just software. Blade servers are becoming less expensive, and now it isn't unusual to find racks and racks of computers that are used in everyday applications. A lot of people now have some pretty substantial horsepower at home; in some cases, their home PCs are more powerful than the ones at work. And most of the time, these machines aren't doing much that taxes their CPUs, even with the latest Microsoft applications that grab more and more processing power to do the same tasks. But I digress.

Clusters-on-the-fly are just the tip of the iceberg. Other vendors are beginning to think of clustering as part of their default approach when building their applications. I recently got to see another application that extends the concept of harnessing lots of horsepower for something a bit more understandable, such as video compression.

Here's the problem: Sending digital video around the Internet takes a very fat pipe. This is one of the reasons that copying DVDs hasn't taken off: It takes longer to move all these bits, and you also need lots of processing power to encode and send the video out into the world. What I saw this week from a company called Broadcast International (BI) got me pumped, because what it is trying to do is to compress this video signal as much as possible, so that the receiving end won't need super-duper power to view the video stream.

The issue hinges around using multiple video codecs, which are a combination of software and hardware routines that are designed for particular kinds of scenes and activities. The folks at BI have developed some nifty routines that will allow a video server to switch codecs on the fly, from frame to frame, so that the right kind of compression routine is matched up with the particular kind of scene that is being filmed. For example, they told me about one codec that works well with smoke and fog scenes, and another with rain and water scenes.

The beauty of the system is that you don't need to have much more software on the receiving end, beyond the usual media players from Real and Microsoft (with a small plug-in from BI) to view the encoded video stream. That makes a lot of sense.

Up until now, these codecs were horsepower hogs, and there wasn't an easy way to switch from one to another without a lot of trouble. The company has developed algorithms to do this, and also uses a bunch of clustered computers to encode the video signal. Again, all of this wouldn't be possible just a few years ago, when having a dual processor Pentium 300 was considered hot stuff.

The flash mob computing may get the headlines, but the work that BI and others are doing to build processor-intensive applications will be the ones we'll all be using in the next few years. And from this work we should see other video-oriented applications that will harness the Internet in new and interesting ways.