Dynamic superscalar grid for technical debt reduction

Abstract

Organizations and the private individual, look to technology advancements to increase their ability to make informed decisions. The motivation for technology adoption by entities sprouting from an innate need for value generation. The technology currently heralded as the future platform to facilitate value addition, is popularly termed cloud computing. The move to cloud computing however, may conceivably increase the obsolescence cycle for currently retained Information Technology (IT) assets. The term obsolescence, applied as the inability to repurpose or scale an information system resource for needed functionality. The incapacity to reconfigure, grow or shrink an IT asset, be it hardware or software is a well-known narrative of technical debt. The notion of emergent technical debt realities is professed to be all but inevitable when informed by Moore’s Law, as technology must inexorably advance. Of more imminent concern however are that major accelerating factors of technical debt are deemed as non-holistic conceptualization and design conventions. Should management of IT assets fail to address technical debt continually, the technology platform would predictably require replacement. The unrealized value, functional and fiscal loss, together with the resultant e-waste generated by technical debt is meaningfully unattractive. Historically, the cloud milieu had evolved from the grid and clustering paradigms which allowed for information sourcing across multiple and often dispersed computing platforms. The parallel operations in distributed computing environments are inherently value adding, as enhanced effective use of resources and efficiency in data handling may be achieved. The predominant information processing solutions that implement parallel operations in distributed environments are abstracted constructs, styled as High Performance Computing (HPC) or High Throughput Computing (HTC). Regardless of the underlying distributed environment, the archetypes of HPC and HTC differ radically in standard implementation. The foremost contrasting factors of parallelism granularity, failover and locality in data handling have recently been the subject of greater academic discourse towards possible fusion of the two technologies. In this research paper, we uncover probable platforms of future technical debt and subsequently recommend redeployment alternatives. The suggested alternatives take the form of scalable grids, which should provide alignment with the contemporary nature of individual information processing needs. The potential of grids, as efficient and effective information sourcing solutions across geographically dispersed heterogeneous systems are envisioned to reduce or delay aspects of technical debt. As part of an experimental investigation to test plausibility of concepts, artefacts are designed to generically implement HPC and HTC. The design features exposed by the experimental artefacts, could provide insights towards amalgamation of HPC and HTC.