Distributed and Cloud Computing

Foreword

Ian Foster

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August, 2011

Richard Feynman, in his wonderful autobiography Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, recounts how at Los Alamos in 1944 he was responsible for supervising the human computers who performed the long and tedious calculations required by the Manhattan Project. Using the mechanical calculators that were then the state of the art, the best human computer could achieve only one addition or multiplication every few seconds. Feynman and his team thus developed methods for decomposing problems into smaller tasks that could be performed simultaneously by different people (they passed cards with intermediate results between people operating adders, multipliers, collators, and sorters); for running ...