> “When a member computer is about to perform a computation, it would first check this database. If the computation has already been done, the computer would simply fetch the pre-computed result instead of redoing the computation. The underlying goal is to save on compute resources globally.”
This idea glosses over the engineering complexity of “searching” the cache, which sounds like it will grow to include every possible computation ever.
The reason it’s not feasible is the same reason computers can’t just have an huge L1 cache, instead of a hard drive. There’s physical limitations of materials when retrieving and searching the cache. So just performing the computation is often quicker.
However… your suggestion would be suitable for functional programming. Pure functions should always return the same result, so caching the result of CPU intensive functions makes a lot of sense… which is what [1] bazel’s remote cache does. But most software does not use pure functions…
Also, there is another interesting question that comes to mind. What if “quantum computing” could allow us to do “branch prediction” of computation at an incredible scale?
This idea glosses over the engineering complexity of “searching” the cache, which sounds like it will grow to include every possible computation ever.
The reason it’s not feasible is the same reason computers can’t just have an huge L1 cache, instead of a hard drive. There’s physical limitations of materials when retrieving and searching the cache. So just performing the computation is often quicker.
However… your suggestion would be suitable for functional programming. Pure functions should always return the same result, so caching the result of CPU intensive functions makes a lot of sense… which is what [1] bazel’s remote cache does. But most software does not use pure functions…
Also, there is another interesting question that comes to mind. What if “quantum computing” could allow us to do “branch prediction” of computation at an incredible scale?
[1] https://bazel.build/remote/caching