I was asked the other day if the SMASH does Cloud Computing or Grid Computing [cf. Cloud Computing from Wikipedia] and the answer is that while there is still a lot of ground to cover, in essence that is what the basic framework will do. The Load Balancer (LB) will check for the best resources to allocate (this is still future music) and distribute the simulation accordingly. The basic idea is the same, if you look at the graphic on Wikipedia, the cluster table (that we will have at some point and which will define how the cluster should behave) corresponds loosely to service catalog, the provisioning tool basically does what the LB will do and the Monitor is in essence what the Observer does. Once the pieces fall in place we will obviously also need a Systems Management component, which might be part of the cluster behavior.
So, given that this project was started like 4 years ago, the word "Cloud Computing" did not exist at that time, it seems to have formed during late 2007, but the idea of covering massive computations by networking them on many servers, instead of a large scale server is the same, so in essence I guess, SMASH is a Cloud Computing Framework and what's more, thanks to the unbelievable Virtual machine that Erlang runs on, we can already run cross-platform, the test cluster SMASH is being programmed on, consists of Windows, Linux and MacOS X systems.
Cheers,
Sunweaver
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