Hi i am a software engineering student and in my parallel processisng class, i had to choose between a number of subjects to do a study on, i picked up Tor and i found a lot of material about it, but eventually i will have to do the link between it and the course's main topic, aka parallel and distributed processing. Problem is that i didn't find anything related to that, did i miss something here ? As i see nothing in the circuit construction or sending data encryption that points toward that specific subject.
1 Answer
Tor and paralell processing aren't really related at all.
Distributed computing is something that happens on a grid of computers. Distributed computing is the process of getting a bunch of computers to combine their resources so as to form a resource pool that can then be used as if it were a supercomputer, by dividing work among each node in the computing network. Distributed computing is networked but is really centric to the local system.
Tor is the same in that it is made up of a bunch of interconnected nodes, but its purpose is entirely different. Instead of each Tor node doing work, most are simply relays whose job is to take data in, not do anything with it, and push it out. The Tor software runs on the local computer but it is really centric to the effect of the entire network as a whole. The individual computers don't matter that much.
Distributed computing is processor-intensive, Tor is network-intensive. There really isn't a similarity between the two besides the highly generalized fact that they are both networks of computers.
