Hive Computing

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

Cool quote:
With the idea of convergence in mind, let's think of what we could do with a hive. For one thing, we could put a node on every desk, but instead of being limited to the power of your PC, we could have demand ebb and flow such that you could do computational fluid dynamic modeling on your desktop as easily as you could surf the web. Hives could be cheap adjuncts to Big Iron, or they could replace mainframes completely. A hive is a network, so why not replace all those Cisco routers with hive nodes that happened to route as needed? Same for wireless links. A wireless mesh hive is very interesting. And there is no reason why we couldn't link hives together until the whole net was just an ocean of computing-on-demand. Then every school could effectively have a supercomputer, even the high schools.