I am Carl Sutherland. I attended Ambridge Area High School in Pennsylvania for my secondary education. In PA, a requirement for graduating seniors is a senior project. The project is supposed to reflect skills you had learned during high school, while showcasing how you future goals relate to your topic. That sums up the guidelines of the project.

For the most part, as you can imagine, the projects are a joke; mostly just a blowoff. Because I hate wasting my time, I chose for my topic something I had planned on playing with anyways: distributed computing. Basically, this is taking a computational problem, such as calculating pi to the nth decimal place, and dividing the workload ammong any number of computers, usually via a network. The technology for this began to surface in the early nineties and has only recently gained mainstream use.

My exposure to this niche of the computing world began at Pennsylvania Governor's School for Information Technology the summer before my senior year. In researching the topic, I found many examples of not only where to use these networks to solve computing problems, but also how to implement the systems. I found no resources, other than more is better, for the scaling of these systems.

Of course more computers will result in greater performance of the cluster. But, most unfortunately, our world is bounded by the rules of economics in that resources are always limited: you cannot have an infinate number of computers in a distributed computing network. Looking at both these views, more is better and limited resources, poises the question where can you get the most bang for your buck? This is the question this project aims to answer.