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The Information Factories Are Here
prostoalex writes, "Wired magazine has coined a new term for the massive data centers built in the Pacific Northwest by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Cloudware is, ironically, a return of the centralized data and bandwidth power houses caused by the decentralized and distributed nature of the Internet. George Gilder thinks we're witnessing something monumental: 'According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?'"
At some point massive data centers won't provide incremental benefits unless the massive increases in processing power are met with proportional decreases in bandwidth prices. Sure, bandwidth prices have dropped, but not by nearly the rate of price/teraflop processing has. Companies like Google recognize this, and are investing in their own fiber to compensate. But the telecommuncations companies are the ones that originally build these lines, and it's unfortunately in their best interest to keep the supply of spare bandwidth very low.
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" And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?'"
I don't know if you realize this, but the idea that dinosaurs were an incapable species is a myth? They obviously didn't last millions of years because of any defects. But when a big-ass meteor comes crashing into the planet, any species capable or not would be hard-pressed to survive.
what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?
How will we feed it? Read the article about the robot that identifies human flesh as bacon and see if that answers your question.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
When we look at our current situation, we see that we have data 'here' and data 'there'. When we want to have more data, we need to go 'there' to bring the data 'here' for viewing. In the most extreme (and common) case, the data is only temporarily copied from 'there' to 'here' and once we are done with the data it is deleted from 'here'.
The future will eliminate that differentiation. Data will not be 'here' or 'there'. Rather, it will be. Data will simply exist and we will access it as if it were immediately 'here' all the time.
It will take quite a bit more technology to make this a reality, but the Internet is the first baby step away from separation of data repository and the user. Now, users can access data 'there' on a browser which is 'here' with a few keystrokes. In the future, this action of 'getting' data will be eliminated completely.
How I think that will occur is neither here nor there, but I guarantee that this is what will happen.
"What Gilder calls 'petascale computing' is anything but free. The marginal cost of supplying a dose of processing power or a chunk of storage may be infinitesimal, but the fixed costs of petascale computing are very, very high. Led by web-computing giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Ask.com, companies are dumping billions of dollars of capital into constructing utility-class computing centers. And keeping those centers running requires, as Gilder himself notes, the "awesome consumption" of electricity"
As I noted in our commentary at Data Center Knowledge, the power issues with high-density blade server computing has been understood for years. Back in 2002, Liebert and APC and other equipment vendors were developing products that could address huge heat loads. They saw it coming, and sensed a market opportunity. So where were the chip makers? Even as cooling vendors prepared for the results of the huge power and heat loads, little was done to address their source.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
> "what kind of machine labors to be born?"
As the saying goes, don't anthropomorphize machines: they hate that.
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What is going to happen, or what is happening, is that the service value of information is exceeding the content value of information, and will continue to do so at a greater rate from now on. The information age is doing to information services what the industrial revolution did for production. Eventually, information restrictions like copyrights will be such an incredible and annoying hinderence on providing information services that the financial pressure to kill them will become unbearable.
the saying goes that computing power doubles every 24 months. but i have found that in the real world, the number is closer to 30 months.
...
the benchmark: Content Creation Winstone 2000. it works out all the parts of a pc.
(under windows 2000):
(introduced in May 1997)
intel pentium II 300Mhz
score: 15
(introduced in Oct 1999)
intel pentium III 733Mhz
score: 30
thats 29 months to double
under windows 98SE:
april 1998
intel pentium II 400Mhz
score: 19.5
nov 2000
intel pentium 4 1500Mhz
score: 42
thats 31 months to double
OUTLOOK FOR NEXT FIFTY YEARS
(for thirty month performance doubling rate):
in 30 months: TWICE the performance.
in 60 months: FOUR TIMES the performance.
in 25 years we will have ONE THOUSAND times the performance.
and, in 50 years we will have ONE MILLION TIMES THE PERFORMANCE!!!!!!!
will that finally be enough to make our computers as smart as we are? how many watts of electricity will it consume?
CPUmark99 doubling:
24 months
sysmark 2000 double time: 27 months
ccwinstone04 double times 30 months
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Authority questions you. Return the favor.
In general, I think that it makes sense to "outsource" basic infrastructure. I used to run my own servers, but after figuring the costs for electricity, bandwidth, and hardware costs, I switched to leasing two managed virtual servers - paying for the CPU, memory, and bandwidth resources that I need. I view Amazon's EC2 service the same way: when I need a lot of CPU time over a short time interval, simply buy it.
...and in 2025 the Galactic publishing company, well known for their travel guide, The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, bought Google to include their data as a subset of the entry of a little planet in the backwaters of the universe, called earth. Just in case someone wished to travel there ....
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It doesn't matter if computing performance doubles if the software that runs on it decays in performance at an even greater rate. Back in 1988 MSDOS used to boot in less than 10 seconds after the BIOS POST. Who cares if you'll have software with features greater than your brain, with capacity to even guess your thoughts, wishes and desires, if it will just do what you want without mouseclicks of speech commands, who cares for all these features if it takes 5 years to boot up on a computer a gazillion times faster than today's computers, and its processing speed is uttering 3 words per decade while consuming 900 gigawatt of electric power? Case in point: Windows Vista.
One day, about 4+ years ago, when I was working at a porn shop, this Russian computer scientist came in. He seemed pretty smart and was yakkin about optical computers and some project he had worked on in the 90's in Russia or something. Anyway, he said this would happen, the return of the paralell mainframe. He said that we were reaching the limits of current silicon and copper materials. With optical still a long way out, he said we would probably build mainframes for a while again. He also said CPUs made out of diamonds with optical high speed interfaces were the future but nobody was putting money into it (for various reasons...), and that was why he didn't have a job. He said he figured companies would be clamoring for peopel like him once the materials, like manufactured diamonds, were more readily available. I still believe him, but nobody ever listens to me when I talk about that guy. I met quite a few kewl people at the 'ole porn ship actually.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
Even if you take the meteor hypothesis as absolute truth, the fact is: other species survived. Not only mammals, but also lizards. Heck, even some species of dinosaurs survived. (Birds _are_ technically dinosaurs.)
We're not talking just a massive shockwave killing anything squishy on the planet instantly. Even for the dinosaur there's no D-Day when everyone died. The disappearance of the dinosaurs is a very very very long and gradual period of their declining numbers into extinction. For most of the planet we're talking "just" a climate change. _That_ is what killed the dinosaurs, one way or another. Some species survived that, and in fact even thrived in the new conditions, some species didn't.
Note however there are more hypotheses about that event. The decline in oxygen content in the air in that period, for example, would also be perfectly enough on its own to make a very large beast non-viable. The change in the flora is another candidate. It's entirely possible that the new kinds of plants were either toxic or not nutrient-rich enough for the old lizards.
At any rate, what killed the dinosaurs was _change_. Something changed (take your pick what you think was the killer change there). And some species could deal with it, some species didn't. Dinosaurs (except birds) didn't cope well with the change and their numbers went downhill from there.
Yes, they were a capable species for the old environment, but then the environment changed. And the dinosaurs were suddenly very incapable in the new environment.
So, yes, the dinosaurs are the _perfect_ metaphor for someone or something who can't cope with a change and becomes obsolete.
Change happens. One day you have a nice business hammering scythes and sickles for a village, and the next day someone goes and buys a tractor and a combine harvester and everyone wants _those_. Or you have a nice job calculating tables of numbers by hand and then the CEO goes and buys one of those new "computers". Tough luck. Either you adapt or you're a dinosaur.
It happens with computers and programmers/admins/whatever every day. And some people adapt, some become relics trying to stop progress and return to the good old days. God knows half of the IT departments at big corporations have too many of _those_. Maybe they were once capable and competent. The dinosaurs were too at one point. Now they no longer are. And just like the dinosaurs, sadly it takes a long long time to gradually get rid of those relics. But just like the dinosaurs they _are_ on a slow painful path to extinction.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But this is the biggest load of new age bullshit I've heard in years.
Deleted
First, what makes computer "intelligence" is the software, not raw power. And we will need a substantially new software paradigm to get near our intelligence. I can't imagine how software can get consciousness and awareness. There are parts of the human thought that can't be simulated with a series of conditional numeric operations.
factor 966971: 966971
Computers getting too "smart", we've seen it before.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Incredibles (even though it turned out to be something different, the idea was still there)
Superman 3
Wargames
Terminator 1/2/3
All of these movies depict computers getting too smart then at some point start "thinking" for themselves. One of these days I'll finally get to publish my theory on how to prevent this. I'll give a short summary belo...
<Connection terminated by remote host>
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be simulated with a series of conditional numeric operations."
You did say it was impossible. You didn't say anything about a new paradigm. Why you'd want to lie about your own publicly visible words totally escapes me.
Still, in case there's a there here: Are you claiming there is a class of problems, such as simulating a thinking human brain, that cannot be executed by a Turing machine? That is an extraordinary claim, and needs extraordinary evidence. Cite?
--
phunctor
"here's a shovel, keep digging"
It's the old rate-of-energy-consumption vs energy-consumed misused once again.
An average household consuming 10 megawatt-hours in a year is pretty dull. An average household consuming 10 megawatts - now that'd be impressive! (Got to power all those gadgets, y'know!)
I think he means that the data center row would consume in an hour the same amount of energy that the average US household consumes in a year.
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