RSS FeedIf you happen to follow the Einstein’s Eyes twitter (www.twitter.com/einsteinseyes) or are a fan of our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/einsteinseyes), then you may have seen a few recent articles posted that discuss cloud computing. This is an area that fascinates me – I am personally convinced that cloud computing is the current “next big thing” in our industry.
Before my time, companies used a mainframe and terminal setup – employees had access to terminals that they could log into and use the mainframe’s resources to run their programs or look up their information. More recently, scientists have been uploading their programs to supercomputers and reserving time slots for them to actually run their programs. For both of these situations, the involved tasks are hugely complex (for the time period) and thus running them on a personal computer would either be too expensive or take far too long. The ability to utilize one extremely powerful machine for these problems was a great solution – and cloud computing is the new development in this area.
Essentially, a cloud is a large set of computers working together as one. Traditionally, we think of computers as individual entities – you have a CPU, memory, hard disk, various inputs and outputs, and it all works inside the bounds of an operating system, but clouds rethink this age-old idea. Instead, think of a computer as a set of CPUs, each with their own memory, their own hard disk, their own I/Os, and yet just one distributed operating system between them all.
There is no one “master” computer involved; every computer in a cloud has the potential to begin its own process and allocate resources to other computers. Additionally, a cloud of X total computers can recover gracefully from the failing of up to X computers in their cloud; basically, the only way to take down a cloud is to take down every single computer in the cloud. Also, clouds allow for new computers to be added to the cloud at any time, and can even rejoin computers that failed unexpectedly and get them caught back up to where they were.
Clouds are the future of the supercomputer. The notion of a supercomputer has grown to mean a ginormous space heater with many hundreds or thousands of processors chugging along on some distributed memory and hard disk space. Clouds can redefine this. I’m sure that the most powerful supercomputers of tomorrow will actually just be clouds. No longer will you need an entire floor for the next best computer (though, of course you could), you’ll instead be able to distribute the computers all around the world!
In a way, clouds will be a return to the idea of the mainframe and terminal. You’ll be able to purchase a very inexpensive PC that, with a good internet connection, will be more powerful than any $5,000 machine you could build yourself. Basically, your computer will only need to be capable of streaming inputs and outputs to and from the cloud – something any computer made in the last 10 years should be able to handle. Your computer just handles the display and relaying of I/Os and the cloud handles all of the actual “thinking” for you.
There are already some companies that are utilizing clouds. Google is one example. Another is OnLive, a subscription service for computer games. You pay a subscription fee, which gives you access to the OnLive cloud. They claim that when they go live in 2011 that subscribers will be able to game at 60 frames per second in up to 1080p – the home computer and internet connection will only need to be able to handle a video stream of their desired speed and quality.
Cloud computing is not without its faults (openness of the cloud, potential for sensitive information to be captured by others in the cloud, etc), but despite these issues, I’m sure that clouds will become quite a norm in the near future.