Toward the Eco-Grid: A Harmoniously EVOLVED INTERCONNECTION ENVIRONMENT

摘要

The Internet, along with its myriad resources and users, constitutes a vast artificial virtual environment that benefits all of human society. But both the general public and the research community may be unaware of its developmen-tal trend toward disorder due to the exponential growth of the numbers and types of its resources and users. By way of analogy, this trend can be explained with the help of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that if we regard the environment as a closed system with constant volume and energy, then every change to the system increases its tendency toward entropy. Web users are regularly dissatisfied with the Web's information services, and IT professionals worldwide look to establish new interconnection environments through, say, the Semantic Web, the Grid, and peer-to-peer and intelligent technologies. But these efforts neglect the problem of how to prevent the new environment from falling into its own future disorder, especially when some factors (such as resources and users) change dramatically.