TC deals with computation in terms of functions. Anything with I/O is pretty much outside Turing's view. And you'll be doing a good deal of I/O in a distributed application like this. So just being TC isn't good enough.

Just how much I/O you'll be doing depends on your application. There are some problems that could get sufficient bandwidth by having an intern load data off a floppy. Others are going to need high-speed fiber optic connections in order to keep up. Some problems are going to be just plain slower than doing it on a single machine.

In any case, you could certainly do this with Perl. Would it be useful? If the application's bottleneck is I/O, then Perl would probably be a viable choice. However, good candidates for distributed systems are usually not I/O-bound. They're CPU-bound, like "take this DES-encrypted message and try decrypting it with keys x through x + 2**y, and let me know if any of them break the message". For something like that, you want a good number-cruncher language like C or FORTRAN.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

In reply to Re^2: Google's MapReduce by hardburn
in thread Google's MapReduce by BioGeek

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