Distributed computing is a common term
when coming across parallel computing. Any task which is done by more than one
device can be considered as distributed computing. It sounds fairly simple but
the problem is, most people do not realize that the concept of distributed
computing is just around in their daily life activities. Back in the old days,
when the usage of thumb drives start getting popular, people transfer files by
using thumb drives. At that particular time, thumb drives are considered useful
and have increase the level of convenience during any computational activities.
Now many of you may be asking: Am I
going away from the topic “Distributed computing”? Be patient. I’m just giving
examples. There are many examples regarding the usage of thumb drives, but I’m
going to give an example which is close to us: The usage of thumb drives in the
university environment.
I believe that most of you have
suffered the experience of burning midnight oil, cracking your heads, not head.
I’m talking about group assignments. That some of them are indeed really heavy
that you and your friends have to get awake until 5.00am or even after that. At
this time, group works have to be accomplished using thumb drives. Each member
participates in each different part of the group assignments. At the middle of
the teamwork, team members may find it necessary to transfer a file, e.g. a
word document, an excel document, or a piece of source code to their other
teammates for purposes such combining their work or correcting any mistakes. Therefore
thumb drives play their big roles in this particular file transfer. I believe
that even most of the IT students in UniSZA do this! I’m pretty confirmed,
because I’m also a part of this.
Since my friends and I have lived in
rental house outside house and own a 4Mb Streamyx Internet package in our
rental house, I’m no longer have interest of using thumb drives anymore. We
starts doing a task using LAN. Now this may sounds related to the topic. I have
created a workgroup in our house via the ADSL modem/router that we have
purchased. Every computer which is connected to our workgroup can interact with
other computers such as doing assignments, file transfer and of course, playing
DoTA. Since the installation of Internet, I am no longer using my thumb drives
for file transferring. Instead, my thumb drives are used only for backup purposes
or if the router fails. I know this seems too simple and some of you may think
that this method of simple distributed computing is not worth to be posted
here. But I still want to share with you and if possible, I am going to show you
how to make it in your home so you can actually doing assignments with your
housemates using LAN. Stay tuned for my next post on how to make a workgroup in
your home as well.
From Pang Kok An a.k.a Pang
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