Cheaper computers are attractive to a larger market, thus are manufactured in much larger volume, which means that manufacturers can amortize the massive development costs.

Smaller computers offer a better cost/performance ratio than larger ones.

Compare MPP (supercomputer) to workstataions:

  • MPP systems tend to lag 1~2 years behind workstations. At 50% performance imporvement per year, a two-year lag costs more than a factor of two in the bottom-line computational performance.
  • MPP requires extra work on software side.
  • MPP has advantage on communication performance and provides a global system view

Motivation of NOW by then:

  • Faster network
  • More powerful workstation
  • Disks are bigger but still slow

Opportunities for NOW

  • Distributed shared memory (FaRM today)
  • Cooperutztefile caching (Distributed file systems today?)
  • RAID over network (Storage servers today)
  • Parallel computing (today)

Same today:

  • Lean communication layers reduces software overhead.
  • Commodity hardware is cheaper and easier to use. Specialized hardware takes longer time to develop and requires software adaption but (perhaps?) provides better performance.
  • Smartphones / iPads are more popular than computers.