Open distributed computing research questions/topics?

Question

Hej,

I recently read a lot of papers from Lamport, Fischer, Lynch, Brewer to get a feeling for their perspective of distributed systems.

I was wondering, what are current open distributed computing research questions/topics? Many areas from databases, communication, fault-tolerance, number crunching, etc. seem to be tackled and in quite solid hands.

What do you think are new areas, maybe someone did think of in the past but rendered it impossible and now it becomes possible? A topic like graph algorithms/databases/analysis?

I would also appreciate if anyone can give a some hints of must-read papers about distributed systems. They can also be a more "sci-fi" to just stay inspired.

Answer 1

Something I have had a big interest in is the potential for using cloud computing / distributed systems to run 3D software, such as you could set up essentially a virtual production studio "in the cloud", as it stands now the cloud providers offer only very basic rudimentary graphics support as their hardware is not equipped with anything approaching high end graphics cards..

I think in the future this type of platform could be also used for online games and things of that nature, such as to take away the need for local computing power, with the increase in broadband speeds (some places in the U.S. now have access to fiberoptic lines with 50+ MB per second) this is becoming an increasing possibility in the near future.

I don't play computer games myself and just used to do some 3D design / animation work but I look at it more from a business perspective and think that this has a lot of potential as, for example, someone with just a basic notebook laptop could eventually be able to use a remote connection to a distributed computing network to play a CPU intensive game (likely through a subscription based set up as this obviously would be taxing on the company providing such a game service as they would be providing all the computing power).