Cloud Computing Isn't Just Vaporware

I think it is a lot more than just an IBM "On Demand" services approach, and I believe it is the next step beyond Grid computing.  Google is actually one of the leaders Cloud Computing.  Cloud computing is how Google supports the Google Aps, Search, Sites, Pages, etc.  Google is currently working with Universities to train students in the way that Google does its computing.  IBM is buying in and partnering with Google.  TJ Watson and three other IBM research centers are players.  Google has also developed a Google File System (GFS) to deal with the massive amounts of data involved. A driving force here is that a lot of research institutions, like us, are flat running out of room, cooling and power to house massive HPC installations to meet research computing needs.  I think one of the places the Google and IBM partnership may be going is to form a research computing cloud where each contributes some resource that can be shared by all.  That is beginning to sound like a Stone Soup approach.  In the early days of HPC we used that approach, and we called it condominium computing - each department bought some part of the massively parallel networked computer resource, and then got some time to use it all.    

The intended end state of cloud computing is that computing resources become a commodity like electricity. Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt believes that 90% of all computing will reside in a cloud, with things like high-end graphics processing still residing in the other 10%.  IBM started two notable research projects in cloud computing this year: Critical Enterprise Cloud Computing Services with Georgia Tech and Ohio state, and Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers (RESERVOIR) in the EU.  Amazon is already offering it in their EC2 and S3 services.  Some think that the Amazon stuff is too expensive at about $1 per hour for compute time, but I'm not sure I agree.  I also expect these vendors will negotiate price.  I'm sure IBM intends to move to where they can sell this to their commercial computing customers at some point, too. 

Interestingly, these cloud computing services are based on several open source projects including Linux, Apache Derby, Hadoop, Lucene, and Nutch.  Yet another example of how open source applications can be combined into products that vendors can sell.

One of my tests for reality is to see who is talking about this topic.  Irving Wladawsky-Berger is now talking about it in his blog Reflections on Cloud Computing.  When people like Irving focuses on something like this, I begin to think it is real. 

  Al W.

The Thunder Storm picture is from Flickr by Vermin Inc