tziteras

Networks are by their nature, failure prone. Whether you are talking about a person in your extended network turning up as requested to a place, or a computer not crashing when you need it, you can't really control the remote points. But you can "influence" it - devote more time to any node and give it incentives such as quick replacement arrangements, money, systems administrator time etc. In working on the Locating Grid Technologies workshop series' last practical event, we had to take this into account. I envisioned the connections as being a central set of maybe 2-3 nodes that we really checked up on and ensured would be functioning on the day, and then as many other nodes as needed, but with no checks or involvement from us. In a much larger network we'd have had the chance to test out many more of the fallacies/problems/opportunities of distributed computing, but I'm impressed at how much a social/performance event resembles a generic computer procedur...