
Dryad - Distributed computing infrastructure from Microsoft Research - lssndrdn
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dryad/
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tomh-
I wonder if the benefits of this product outweigh the cons of the costs of all
the MS Windows 2008 licenses you need to get to run Dryad.

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rbranson
This would be cool if it actually offered something tangible that the existing
distributed computing infrastructures lacked. It's like they've basically
invented Hadoop.NET, so now it's something new and great. Congrats Microsoft,
you are once again late to the party.

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sgk284
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft (but this is all my opinion).

Dryad has been discussed publicly since around 2006 (iirc). Hadoop's earliest
public release I can find is from 2007 (but I'm sure it was around before
that).

I just want to put this into perspective. Microsoft isn't suddenly
implementing MapReduce 6 years after Google released the paper. They realized
as soon as the paper was released that it was a good idea. (Although Microsoft
had some decent distributed systems already in place)

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rbranson
Thanks for your input, but I don't buy this argument. Public discussion and
actual working software releases are two completely different things. In
addition, considering cash on hand, I expect Microsoft to innovate and bring
new ideas to market, not simply re-invent the status quo within their own
platforms.

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sgk284
Sorry, should have qualified 'discussing'. By the time Microsoft started
talking about it, they had a functioning system. The turn around was pretty
damn quick.

As far as innovation goes, read up on Dryad. They do a few pretty interesting
things. It goes above and beyond what MapReduce does. The computation is
expressed as a giant dynamic directed graph (the graph can change during
computation). Each node is a program that feeds into other programs, but fault
tolerance and all the other messy bits of distributed programming are
abstracted away from the programmer. Think of it as a more generic MapReduce
that allows a broader set of computations to easily be performed (put another
way, MapReduce provides a subset of the computations possible with Dryad. I
suspect given enough cleverness you could get MapReduce to do everything Dryad
does, but it'd be pretty hacky)

Also, check out the LINQ support. It is probably one of the coolest things
they've done with it.

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rbranson
I still assert that there's a difference between internal prototyping and
public release. Microsoft is JUST NOW releasing Dryad. It doesn't matter if
they were talking about it for 50 years, what matters is the implementation
and availability.

I understand that it's more than just Hadoop.NET. Perhaps I broad brushed, but
fundamentally, these are tweaks from what exists. I am not saying that it is
purposeless, but I am saying is that I expect more from Microsoft. In order to
justify the cost of purchasing Microsoft products, it must create an order of
magnitude increase in value, which I'm not seeing.

In essence: neat, but marginal.

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sgk284
Ah, see there's the confusion. Dryad has been used internally since day one, I
didn't even know you could get it outside of Microsoft. I don't think it was
initially intended to be a commercial project, but more of a "We do billions
of processing tasks a day, here's a way for us to do it faster and cheaper."

Anyway, yea I agree... it's definitely not as earth-shattering as MapReduce
was. It has some neat integration with other Microsoft technologies but I
never really thought of it as a commercial product.

I don't know why people are down voting you. You had valid points and
concerns. I voted you back up to help out a bit (you shouldn't lose karma over
a perfectly legitimate discussion on the pros and cons of a technology)

