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Past Meeting - February 17, 2005Meetings Picture

Hive Computing: Scalability and Fault Tolerance from Commodity Hardware

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Summary

Mills Ripley and Jason Wyrick gave a fascinating talk on how to weave commodity computing platforms (i.e., Windows PCs) into a mesh so as to achieve a reliable computing base. The secret is in the executive, which keeps track of all computing resources and deploys them to meet the task at hand. Hive computing is similar to autonomic computing, in that it treats the available resources as entities that could fulfill a transaction, and if it fails, the transaction is rolled back and tried elsewhere. 15 people shared the muchies and great material.

Abstract

Hive computing is a new computing model that directly addresses the problems of spiraling costs, escalating complexity, and ever-increasing service level requirements. It does this by providing a middleware fabric that converts a collection of dedicated, commodity computers (x86 running Windows or Linux) into a fault tolerant, scalable and dependable execution environment for transactional and service-oriented applications. Hive computing allows this network of commodity machines to be programmed and managed as if they were one system. The net result is an extremely simple, reliable, and scalable execution environment. For this meeting, an overview of hive computing concepts will be followed by a hive demonstration and technical discussions on hive programming and the hive application execution environment.

Presenter Bio

Mills Ripley is a Regional Manager for Appistry (Formerly Tsunami Research, Inc.) He has more than twenty years experience in the computer industry. Before joining Appistry, he spent 7 years at Rational Software (and subsequently IBM) as a technical representative, technical lead, and manager. Prior to that, he held numerous programming, consulting, and management positions at Xerox, Perot Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Diebold, Inc.

Jason Wyrick is a Regional Technical Lead for Appistry. Prior to joining Appistry, he held technical positions at IBM, Rational Software, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric.