The Uncertain Promise of Utility Computing

icke writes "A quick overview of where the Economist thinks we are with the The Next Big Thing, also known as Stuff that doesn't work yet. Quoting: 'It is increasingly painful to watch Carly Fiorina, the boss of Hewlett-Packard (HP), as she tries to explain to yet another conference audience what her new grand vision of "adaptive" information technology is about. It has something to do with "Darwinian reference architectures", she suggests, and also with "modularising" and "integrating", as well as with lots of "enabling" and "processes". IBM, HP's arch rival, is trying even harder, with a marketing splurge for what it calls "on-demand computing". Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of "seamless computing". Other vendors prefer "ubiquitous", "autonomous" or "utility" computing. Forrester Research, a consultancy, likes "organic". Gartner, a rival, opts for "real-time". Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"

Comments

The unexplainable e-business on demand

[Anonymous Coward]

When I started IBM recently (posting as AC to protect the innocent), I had to attend an orientation class covering IBM's policies and so forth. One of the topics was the "E-business on demand" initiative, IBM's next big thing.

The instructor couldn't explain it, so she brought in a marketing exec, who could only define it in terms of itself. "E-business on demand is about computing, on demand, for e-business." Sprinkle in a healthy dose of meaningless adjectives, and you get the picture.

I'll tell you, it's pervasive. Since then, I've not found one person who can give a cohesive definition at this company. And yet, it's supposed to be my driving force and ultimate goal.

yay.

Not a new idea, but a good one

[laird]

I was at Thinking Machines (the company that invented massively parallel computing) a decade ago, and back then Danny Hillis talked frequently about "utility computing" -- the idea that your computations would know how to flow back to wherever it needed to be done. So you'd work on a desktop computer and the user interactive bits would run locally, harder parts would flow back to a big CPU in the basement, and the really hard parts could flow back to a city supercomputer, in a CPU equivalent of the power grid.

At a high level, it's a pretty simple idea, and very powerful.

At the detailed level, there are some amazingly hard problems to solve. Like, for example, how does software get split into parts that can be separated with minimal communications overhead, or how do you decide when a task would run more efficiently spread across a bunch of CPU's, or how do you keep running smoothly when a network outage causes 10% of your CPU's to drop off of the grid. ...

I suspect that the reason that all of the big companies are pitching this is that:

1) CPU's and operating systems have been commoditized by Intel/AMD/etc. and Linux, and they want to have a reason for you to buy bigger/better/more expensive systems.

2) Once one of them announced it, they all have to have a "response".

That being said, I think that what they're doing is going to be of real value to high-end customers. If you're running a farm of 5,000 servers, you really need the software to be self-healing, etc.