Inktomi trots in HotBot footsteps towards distributed computing

Last year I prophesied the beginning of true distributed computing when the release of several Digital Alpha computers on the Internet made them available for people without access to Alphas to run programs on.

Since that time, Java Applets have taken a firm hold on the Web - but they only really offer the ability to send application code from a server to the client for execution. This is a form of distributed computing, but not of the type promised by the Alpha servers.

Now, though, Inktomi - the company that developed the search engine technology behind HotWired's HotBot search engine - offers what may be the first step to true distributed computing. Inktomi is developing applications of a Network of Workstations technology developed at the University of California at Berkeley.

At its base, this technology is simple: numerous low cost workstations each with their own processors, memory and disks are brought together on a local area network (LAN) to create a single processing entity in which numerous low-cost processors are combined to create powerful computers.

Inktomi claims these type of parallel computers - built out of numerous individual computers but sharing processing tasks - are potentially more powerful than many of today's large servers.

In a Network of Workstations each processor or small group of processors in a workstation have at their own disposal independent memory, disks and I/O buses. In single computer solutions these resources are concentrated in one place producing possible bottlenecks.