Potential Uses For SockHop
Here are some applications where I think SockHop would prove useful.
A couple of the applications I will probably try to implement myself, but
hopefully I can get other people (who know more about how to write that
specific type of application) to do the others... :^)
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Distributed raytracing across a LAN. SockHop would be a good base
for controlling a "render farm".
-
Any kind of massively parallel scientific calculation. Instead of
buying that Intel Paragon, just run SockHop on the lab's PCs at night.
-
Multi-player network games over a LAN. This would be nice because
you'd only have to manually install the game on one computer, and every
other player would get a copy automatically installed at run-time (and
would automatically be updated to the latest version, too)
-
Distributed volume rendering. Volume rendering is cool, but too much
for one (regular sized) PC. Perhaps a team of PC's could make a go
of it, though.
-
Distributed web serving or database serving. Use SockHop to automatically
keep all the contents of your web pages or database in sync across all
your redundant web servers.
-
Super hi-res interactive 3D environments. Virtual Reality (tm) no
longer requires a $500,000 SGI Onyx; instead you can just hook a bunch
of el-cheapo PCs with Voodoo2 3D video cards (or whatever) together, and
have each render one part of the virtual environment. Then tile all
the monitors together, and hey presto, a super-hi-res 3D display!
As an added bonus, each PC can render spatialized sound through its two
speakers, giving you multi-channel spatialized sound as well. Not
to mention that adding any number of other input or output devices to the
network (HMDs, body tracker suits, laser controllers, etc) is easy because
you are no longer limited to a preset number of available slots or amount
of CPU power. (This is the type of project I want to do, and it is
the main reason I wrote SockHop!)
-
Automated software administration. If you had a bunch of BeOS systems
running the same software, you could use SockHop's file propogation system
to automatically upgrade all of them to the new version.
-
Network usage statistics collection. Run a SockHop node on each machine
on the LAN that reports back to your computer, telling you how much
CPU, disk, network bandwidth, etc. is being used. Or take this one
step further, and use that information to assign various tasks to machines
that are currently idle, do automatic load balancing, etc.
-
Multimedia video walls using tiled displays!
That's all I can think of right now. Please tell me if you have any
other ideas, and I will add them to this list!
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