NVIDIA Targeting Real-Time Cloud Rendering

MojoKid writes "To date, the majority of cloud computing applications have emphasized storage, group collaboration, or the ability to share information and applications with large groups of people. So far, there's been no push to make GPU power available in a cloud computing environment — but that's something NVIDIA hopes to change. The company announced version 3.0 of its RealityServer today. The new revision sports hardware-level 3D acceleration, a new rendering engine (iray), and the ability to create 'images of photorealistic scenes at rates approaching an interactive gaming experience.' NVIDIA claims that the combination of RealityServer and its Tesla hardware can deliver those photorealistic scenes on your workstation or your cell phone, with no difference in speed or quality. Instead of relying on a client PC to handle the task of 3D rendering, NVIDIA wants to move the capability into the cloud, where the task of rendering an image or scene is handed off to a specialized Tesla server. Then that server performs the necessary calculations and fires back the finished product to the client."

Comments

Drawing a cloud in real-time

[tepples]

I assume it has nothing to do with this video.

Re:Drawing a cloud in real-time

[Anonymous Coward]

It has everything to do with NVidia's inability to reach a solution that could be used in your home (or at least his one-man-workshop / studio small) to reach the quality standards they like to advertise. So instead of admitting defeat to other innovators (either a processor as a V-Ray RT would be happy to comment on any interactive GPU card, or finalRender use specialized hardware solutions Progeniq - reports, already used in 2012 is likely to be an absolute blockbuster movie), just give it a different spin on it and start marketing it as a solution to the clouds.

After all, the transfer of gigabytes to terabytes of scene, bitmaps, shaders, etc data is as efficient and convenient (Why yes, said ILM, please have basically the source code for the purpose we are doing to Spielberg without a project name, we trust you and their low wage employees at all!)
Oh, wait, no it is not, why spend (compared with the "we already have, we are not represented in it now, it might rent") renderfarms there now are struggling to survive.

In the future, perhaps, or if your bid package with a big fat pipe and some really heavy NDA, but for now it seems they're getting ahead of the market .. and themselves.

Re:Drawing a cloud in real-time

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot. "Real-time" means that you can draw clouds at the screen refresh rate, not every 5 minutes.

Why is rendering clouds so important?

[szo]

oh, wait...

Re:Why is rendering clouds so important?

[suso]

The gaming industry has been trying to jump start the flight simulator market again.

Stupidest idea ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Clouds for render farms seems fine. In fact, you are just putting a fancy new cloudy name on the render farms that have been around forever.

But render farms for on-line gaming seems like the most ridiculous idea. Note the demo nVidia showed:

but the speed of the updates didn't remotely come close to "approaching an interactive gaming experience," unless said experience involved attempting to run Doom on your 16MHz 386 with the screen size set at maximum. Update times varied from 10-20 seconds, and that's a significant lag when discussing online usage patterns.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Which makes me wonder what the point is here really. OnLive is in testing already. TFA doesn't compare to OL so I don't know why Nvidia's offering is so much better.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[poetmatt]

this is the "whoops" of cloud computing and why it doesn't work for these purposes. Render farms do what they do well, and so does distributed computing. Neither of these are cloud.

Can we please stop the marketing hype for everything cloud?

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[Sockatume]

Well, the new name is supposed to be for the specific case of moving traditionally local computing tasks off to farms. Doing a movie on a remote render-farm is hardly cloud computing, but re-encoding your holiday video is.

Latency aside, my worry is that you're buying a gaming timeshare. It's cheaper to pay for the computing time you actually use, in principle. However online game communities depend on lots of people playing at the same time, which is exactly the sort of thing that would make online gaming uneconomical. Example:

Somebody's got to pay for the shedloads of hardware.

If you have six users, and their usage is distributed over the whole day so each is on for 4 hours with no overlap, then you only have to invest in one "virtual games PC" worth of hardware for those six users. You've got six paying customers for an investment in one games PC! Charge them each a quarter of the cost of an up-to-date games machine over a year, and there's your profit margin (you get back 1.5 times the cost of the hardware), and the value for the end user (they only have to pay 0.25 the cost of the hardware).

If you have six users, and four of them are online at the same time because they're in the US and Western Europe and playing against each other, then you need four "virtual games PCs" worth of hardware to handle that peak demand. The rest of the day, you have two users, sharing the four computers. So over the day you're bringing in an average of three users over four "virtual games PCs" that you've invested in. It's hard to find a way to make that profitable, except having off-peak discounts to try to smooth out the usage patterns.

I guess what I'm saying is that when it comes to gaming, computing power isn't fungible.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[Sockatume]

Hell, an average of less than 3 users. If those four are online for only four hours, and your system is only loaded with two users the other eight hours, then you're only getting an average of one and a third users over four computers. How do you get one and one third users to pay for four games machines?

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you got modded troll and this guy:

"by thisnamestoolong (1584383) on Wednesday October 21, @10:33AM (#29823275)
Please stop talking about "cloud" computing -- it is one of the dumbest buzzwords I have ever heard in my entire life -- not to mention the fact that it is a totally meaningless term."

Got modded insightful.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[im_thatoneguy]

I take it you don't have a render farm. If you're closer to delivery your render farm is probably completely occupied rendering final frames. If you are in the middle of a project it's probably running at quarter or half capacity. A render farm is often either over burdened or under burdened. That's a situation that's perfect for cloud computing. Instead of wasting thousands and thousands of dollars in idle machines you simply pay for the time when you need processing power. And since most of the world won't be rendering simultaneously a shared farm better distributes the investment. The only challenge now will be asset management and synchronizing a couple of GBs of scene data back and forth.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[slim]

Which makes me wonder what the point is here really. OnLive is in testing already. TFA doesn't compare to OL so I don't know why Nvidia's offering is so much better.

Nvidia and OnLive are partners: http://www.onlive.com/partners.html

  These announcements are probably related to OnLive.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[slim]

Managing for capacity will certainly be the difficult part of running a cloud server farm.

It's fairly obvious, that if you build your farm to cope with the peaks, there will be spare capacity during the troughs.

But there are strategies to deal with this. For a start you can soften the peaks with pricing strategies. You could even offer discounts for off-peak gaming.

Plus, you could sell your off-peak capacity for other purposes. For example, a Hollywood animation could be rendered using the spare off-peak capacity on a gaming server farm. Substitute your own favourite long-running parallelisable data processing job.

Appropriately enough, given cloud computing's previous buzzword - grid computing - it's not all that different to the way power companies handle fluctuations in demand.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[Sockatume]

I suppose that's nVidia's idea with the new platform, then: to make graphics rendering genuinely fungible.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[Zerth]

Apparently you work for a company who only works on one project at a time and only has one team.

If a company isn't partway into its next project by the time the current one project is done, I wouldn't want to work there - too unstable.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[im_thatoneguy]

With multiple teams and multiple projects you tend to just increase the frequency of the spikes in demand not even them out. Yesterday our farm was at capacity and queued up for an excess of 5 hours. Right now there is no wait to start rendering. Yesterday we needed a farm 4x our size. Today we need a farm a quarter. But even that isn't really the way it works either. Yesterday we would prefer to have had a farm 100x our size for 30 minutes. Today we would want to have a farm 100x our size for 1 minute. It's always going to be a balance when you own your farm between potential speed and idle time. The faster your farm is the more your machines will sit idle. So if you invest in a huge farm you'll get your sequences back instantly but then your farm sits idle most of the time. If you have a really small farm you might have to wait a day but they'll always be working.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[dacut]

I can't fathom, though, why nVidia -- a graphics chipset maker which has nothing to do with the ray tracing you're describing -- would be interested in this.

The bandwidth between the CPU and the graphics chipset is a frequent bottleneck. This is why the graphics adapter often has a special slot (VLB vs. ISA; AGP vs. PCI; PCI-e x16 vs. PCI-e x1) and why we're starting to see the marriage of the CPU and graphics chipset (AMD buying ATI, nVidia talking about making their own CPU, Intel making graphics chips, etc.). Put this on the cloud, and your bandwidth is shot, and suddenly latency is a huge issue.

Re:Stupidest idea ever

[poetmatt]

uh, do you not understand the disingenuous statement of misunderstanding what a render farm *is* versus cloud computing?

If you have a render farm, synchronizing GB's back and forth is obviously not an issue already.

People have rented out their computing for many many years, just because it's "cloud" doesn't mean it's new or creative.

No more!!

[thisnamestoolong]

Please stop talking about "cloud" computing -- it is one of the dumbest buzzwords I have ever heard in my entire life -- not to mention the fact that it is a totally meaningless term.

Re:No more!!

[Sockatume]

It's got a very well-defined meaning: performing computing and storing data on an internet-connected server from an internet-connected client. It's a new term for, arguably, a very old thing, coined because the average end-user these days isn't familiar with the idea of doing their computing from a dumb terminal.

Re:No more!!

[thisnamestoolong]

Umm... that was pretty much my whole point. It makes me want to claw out my own eyes when I hear these jack off tech companies talking about this new "cloud" computing phenomenon -- it is only a new (and exceptionally stupid) buzzword for something that we have been doing for a long, long time. It is not "cloud" computing -- it's just fucking regular old computing -- with CPU's and memory and HDD's and the like -- it just happens to be taking place somewhere else.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they had peaked with the hype around AJAX. But you're right, computing publications have taken it to the next level with "cloud computing".

The people who hype "cloud computing" tend to be young and ignorant. Here is a perfect example of this.

Simply put, these young punks have a huge ego, but no knowledge of computing history. They don't realize that "cloud computing" is merely what we called "mainframes" back in the day. Their low-powered hand-held devices that'd supposedly benefit from the cloud really aren't different at all from the dumb terminals we hooked up to our mainframes.

Most enterprises moved away from the mainframe because it just wasn't as useful and efficient as individual desktop systems on each user's desk. Unfortunately, most of those fools pushing "cloud computing" these days were born well after we made that transition. They don't realize that they're just resurrecting problems that we dealt with in the early 1980s.

Re:No more!!

[werfu]

Cloud computing is the combination of distributed computing using a cluster and network storage. It's nothing new, but it haven't been harnesses to do general purpose computing 'till recently. I think it happened because of our ability to now run VM into a cluster seamlessly (switching workload between servers) and treat the cluster as one unique entity, hence the could.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's my privacy, oh no I lost my privacy, please help me find my privacy!
*Sob sob*

- Meaningless.com

Re:No more!!

[glop]

I am not that sure actually. It's not very well defined and different people use it differently, sometimes with a marketing agenda.
But it also conveys some property quite clearly:
  - cloud computing is not precisely located and you don't really care
  - it's not happening in your home
  - it's everywhere or almost
  - it's out of your control (others may access it without your knowledge etc.)
  - it can disappear and be unavailable anytime (just like real clouds ;-)

The previous terms were not bad either, but the market made them more precise. For instance, there was Grid computing: it's always a cluster inside a company that provides centralized computing power for embarassingly parallel problems. The original idea was that it would be like the electrical grid and you would just send your problems to the computing grid and they would go wherever there was an excess supply of computing power. Very cloud-like actually...

I don't think the term is useless and I actually think it's nice to change the buzzwords every so often...

 

Re:No more!!

[suso]

It's got a very well-defined meaning:

No it does not. People continue to misuse what it means in everything from daily speech to presentations, manager proposals and articles. The solution to everything nowadays is "Put it in the cloud", but few people really understand what they are saying when they say that.

Its just like most other buzzwords of the past 10 years. People here them and then think they are smart for repeating them to get what they want.

Re:No more!!

[Sockatume]

No, your whole point was that it's meaningless. Which we've established it isn't.

Your new argument is that the distinction between cloud computing and local computing is unimportant. Well, ask anyone who's had a computer-time grant on one of the monstrous IBM research clusters how they feel about the distinction between "fucking regular old computing" that "just happens to be taking place somewhere else" and going out and just buying their own hardware.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM mainframes have had virtualization capabilities like that since the 1960s! Haven't you kids ever heard of CP/CMS and IBM's VM line of mainframe operating systems?

I was at a conference two weeks ago, and stopped at a booth for a cloud computing company. I talked to one of their marketing reps (some kid in his early 20s) who was going on and on about how "innovative" their product was. So I had to politely inform him how their so-called "innovations" had been done a few years before his parents had even been born.

Not only that, but they actually worked back then! What IBM put together was rock solid. That's why we still see some vintage systems used today. Today's cloud computing "solutions" are a huge farce compared to what IBM put together decades ago.

Re:No more!!

[Sockatume]

By your criterion, "CPU" has no well-defined meaning. Bugger-all people who say that have a clue what it actually means. However that does not magically undefine it.

Re:No more!!

[PhrostyMcByte]

"Cloud" is a pretty stupid name, one that bugs me almost as much as "AJAX", but it's hurt even more by being associated with two things at once.

The first is simply a client->server connection, or perhaps hosting your data online. This, I think, doesn't need a new name. The old names were working fine.

The second, and far more interesting, is for much more complex systems that are marking a move from managed server hosting to scalable application hosting. These guys design their systems from the ground up to scale your applications quickly, efficiently, and reliably across a pool of servers. By doing this all in one place, hopefully with a lower cost than what it would take for you to do something similar on your own. I think this is a significantly different approach that it needs a new name to differentiate it from what we're used to. This is also what TFA seems to mean when they say "cloud".

I'm currently evaluating these cloud services for my company -- the idea that I can simply focus on writing good code and let someone else worry about starting new servers when usage spikes, replacing ones that break, adding more storage for the database, etc... it is very tempting. The cons? They all use proprietary APIs that seem similar on the surface but in the end are different enough that you really need to specialize your code for their service -- if you ever want to move your app over to something else, it's not going to be simple.

Re:No more!!

[IBBoard]

Off-topic (as it is rated) for rendering on the cloud, but potentially on-topic for cloud in general. At the moment people want some degree of privacy of data, but "cloud" wants us to throw it to teh interwebz and process it there. Anyone care to guess how much easier it may become to get the data the OP wanted? ;)

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

>>>"cloud" computing phenomenon -- it is only a new (and exceptionally stupid) buzzword for something that we have been doing for a long, long time
>>>

Well it's similar to when my local TV station started talking about "phantom power". i.e. When you leave your VCR or TV plugged-in, it uses about 5 watts of power. They act as if this is something new, but we engineers have known it as "parasitic" or standby power for a long long time.

And bell-bottom jeans. Today they call them "flares" or "flared" but it's still the same thing.

I guess marketers feel they have to dupe the customers, and the way to do that is by changing the name to something else. "Oh no! Watch out for that ghostly phantom power while your cloud computing in your shinynew flared jeans!"

Re:No more!!

[dintech]

Even better is Cloud 2.0 Computing which is done in actual clouds using standing stone circles and such.

+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

Re:No more!!

[Zumbs]

There are a number of important differences when comparing mainframe/workstation systems to the modern notion of cloud computing. One significant difference is distributing computational problems to a number of concurrent processes on (possibly) distant systems. Another is that where the mainframe were typically placed close to the workstations, the servers in the cloud can be placed remotely. A third is that the workstations often were unable to function without access to the mainframe, modern desktops are able to use the advantages of the mainframe/cloud as well as the advantages of an autonomous desktop.

Re:No more!!

[akabigbro]

I agree. Cloud computing is well defined. Yes, remote processing has been around for a long time, but now there is an interoperable standard that everyone can use (hint: not COM or CORBA), SOAP.

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

If you have Comcast, Time-Warner, or Cox internet you don't have the old style 80s-era time-sharing, but you still have an allotment. About 250 gigs per month. Have fun watching youtube videos, or CBS.com tv shows, or netflix.com rentals, AND doing cloud computing at the same time. You'll have overage fees galore.

Re:No more!!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

with CPU's and memory and HDD's and the like -- it just happens to be taking place somewhere else.

That's an important distinction.

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

People misuse the word "CPU" the way they abuse the word "cloud computing"? Really? I've not heard anyone saying they need to buy a new 1920x1080 CPU, or a new 10 gigabyte CPU for their machines.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear hear!

Re:No more!!

[hairyfeet]

The thing that bus me about this 'cloud computing" nonsense is we already had a perfectly good and well established term for this-thin clients. the reason they are now pushing this cloud computing is for the most part thin client everything went over like a lead balloon so they cook up a new name for the same old crap hoping the buzzword bingo will overcome the problems that everyone had with thin clients, which of course it doesn't.

Latency, control over data, security risks, possibility that your stuff will be gone tomorrow when the company goes tits up that was hosting it,bandwidth caps, etc is all still there, they just want the buzzword bingo to make folks forget about the fact that we have all been down this road before. Considering there are still plenty of places in the USA where I can't get decent broadband and the desire of the ISPs to cap the hell out of us instead of actually investing in infrastructure makes me think that 5 years from now this will be just another dotbomb buzzword chucked in the trashcan of history, just like "On the Internet!" was the buzzword bingo du jour in the late 90s.

Re:No more!!

[Sockatume]

...okay?

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

>>>these young punks have a huge ego, but no knowledge of computing history. They don't realize that "cloud computing" is merely what we called "mainframes" back in the day.
>>>

What I don't understand, even if these young'uns have no knowledge of history, why do they think cloud computing is a good idea? Why would they want to offload all the processing onto some distant central computer, when they have a quadruple CPU sitting right here in front of them? It makes no logical sense.

My own computer may "only" be a Pentium 4, but it's still about 12,000 times faster than the old 8-bit machine where I used to write book reports. If that ancient machine could handle the workload than my current computer certainly can - there's no need to connect to some distant mainframe.

Re:No more!!

[Cornflake917]

...when I hear these jack off tech companies

You mean like the company that developed the fleshlight? I'm surprised slashdot doesn't post more articles about this type of technology, considering the typical slashdotter. Jack off tech: it's the future, man!

Re:No more!!

[Sockatume]

People continue to misuse what it means

It has to have a meaning for people to get the meaning wrong.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you talking about? Seriously. You're not just wrong here and there, you're wrong on EVERY POINT YOU TRIED TO MAKE!

Do you know even the slightest thing about mainframes? Clearly, you don't. For if you did, you'd realize that even low-end mainframes consist of numerous independent processing units (and I'm not talking about the redundant ones, either). Some mainframe systems had processing units in different rooms of the same building, and I worked with one system that had processing units in three different buildings on one campus.

Some mainframes were placed close to the dumb terminals, but it was also very common for users to access a mainframe remotely. Fuck, this was often done with a 300 baud modem over a POTS connection. I remember setting up such systems in the 1970s so that offices in Miami could connect to the mainframes in New York.

You're not as wrong on your third point, but you're still wrong. Various DEC terminals, for instance, did have processing support built in. They often lacked storage, however, so work couldn't be saved.

Re:No more!!

[werfu]

Cloud is as private as any other thing you would put on in a web application : Privacy is bound to your service provider usage term. Their tem of use are a contract between you and them. They are as bound to it as you are, except they have the right to change it anytime and you have the right to refuse the modifications and quit using their service. If they break their term and for any reason your data end up in someone else hands, than you could always go after your service provider and the one that cause the leak. Now if you fear that your info end-up in the government hands, then you've got a bigger problem than worrying about the cloud.

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

>>>It's nothing new, but it haven't been harnesses to do general purpose computing 'till recently.

That's odd. I seem to recall use my VAX terminal to "cloud compute" and do general computing (math problems) back in the 80s. Maybe you think that doesn't count for some reason?

Re:No more!!

[Sockatume]

I would humbly suggest that the people who talk about a 1920 by 1080 anything are unlikely to misuse the term "cloud computing", either. The people who use "cloud computing" as a magic talisman without bothering to know what it means are the sort of people who start their "CPU" with the front-panel lock key and download internets from the email.

This is besides the point. It was argued that, because people use "cloud computing" without knowing what it means, then the term has no meaning. This is simply an absurd statement.

Re:No more!!

[slim]

It's got a very well-defined meaning: performing computing and storing data on an internet-connected server from an internet-connected client.

I disagree. If it doesn't involve large server farms, in which the location of your data/process is arbitrary and ideally diffuse, then it's not cloud computing.

"Cloud" is a fairly good analogy for that.

Re:No more!!

[Sockatume]

I don't think anyone pushing to cut down standby power actually thought they'd discovered some shocking new phenomenon hitherto unreported to science. I've never heard it called "phantom power" at any rate: it must be unique to your region.

Re:No more!!

[ThatMegathronDude]

no, SOAP means processing bulky XML. screw that, do it in JSON.

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

>>>it's nice to change the buzzwords every so often...

Bad is good. And good is bad. War is peace, and chocolate rations have been increased from 10 to 5.

How about instead of inventing words we just use the ones we have? Rather than "cloud" computing we could just call it internet-based computing, because that's what it is.

Re:No more!!

[Sockatume]

It's a trade-off. For trivial tasks like word processing, the performance trade-off is worth the convenience benefit. For the home user's idea of a high-performance-computing task, such as gaming and video watching, the convenience benefit is negligable for the huge performance trade-off.

For real high-performance-computing tasks where purchasing a lot of computing resources for one project might not be justified, again there's a very large convenience benefit to just renting at a distance, which is why mainframes are still in use for scientific research. That's the only example I can think of where it's honestly about power, and it's not what you'd call "cloud computing", if only because that's a term created for home-user consumption.

Re:No more!!

[Sockatume]

You're right, its meaning is even more specific better-defined than I had laid out. In my haste I made it too general.

Re:No more!!

[jhfry]

You missed something... I agree that the term is not clear and is commonly misused, but it does have a meaning.

A cloud service is one that is not provided by A server, but by many servers. Additionally to be considered a cloud service, it must be distributed geographically.

In the beginning computing was centralized, you would use a dumb terminal to access a mainframe system and all of your computing needs were centralized. Then with the PC, computing was distributed. Finally they centralized much of it again with web servers. Now with cloud computing they are actually distributing it again, however they are distributing the servers this time and presentation is still done on a relatively dumb device.

Cloud computing also creates a new networking model. Peer to peer and client-server have been around for ages... but the idea that the "server" can actually be many machines distributed all over the globe working together to provide the service that you perceive as the "server" in the client-server model is a pretty big shift.

Think back just a few years, there were almost no systems of servers that cooperatively worked together to provide a service that weren't within a single data center. Sure there were redundant data centers, but the entirety of your data was stored within a single location. With Gmail for example, your email is distributed across many datacenters. A few years ago the closest we came to distributed processing of a large scale was SETI@home, today they are introducing a product that will render a 3D image that would normally take 10's of minutes in a second or so by leveraging the processing power of thousands of computers around the world.

So "Cloud Computing" definitely has a meaning. Without it you would need to say "global scale distributing computing system".

Re:No more!!

[slim]

People misuse the word "CPU" the way they abuse the word "cloud computing"? Really? I've not heard anyone saying they need to buy a new 1920x1080 CPU, or a new 10 gigabyte CPU for their machines.

Never heard someone refer to the entire desktop case and its contents as "the CPU"? "I plugged the monitor into the CPU, but nothing seems to be happening". I got that all the time when I was in IT support.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Chance of cloudy interwebs, as a cold corperate front moves past the mid-west.
60% chance of raining microsoft .ODF and google sharks.
Watch out for the dry-online across texas, we're expecting some tesla-nados and severe thunder-lolcats.

Re:No more!!

[slim]

What I don't understand, even if these young'uns have no knowledge of history, why do they think cloud computing is a good idea? Why would they want to offload all the processing onto some distant central computer, when they have a quadruple CPU sitting right here in front of them?

It's that phrase "central computer" that suggests to me you've misunderstood cloud computing. If there's one "central computer" handling my request, I wouldn't consider that a cloud service. A cloud service is by definition distributed. Don't think "big mainframe in a datacentre". Think "huge datacentre full of servers with dynamically managed roles".

Why [...] when they have a quadruple CPU sitting right here in front of them?

Maybe they don't have a quad CPU, and maybe they don't want to buy one.

Re:No more!!

[Sgt. B]

You are partially correct. It is not being used as originally intended but it is not meaningless. Most people today use cloud when referring to the computers and resources available over the internet rather than the interconnections of the internet.

Back before the internet, server admins sending data over fiber channel would visually represent the connections as "the network". That's easy to visualize as a fishing net. Then as more lines, servers and jumps were added the term evolved to try to stay with a realistic visual representation. Web was next which was also easy to imagine. Net Fabric was actually used for a while too as the number of lines went up.

Eventually there were so many interconnections and links between computers and networks of computers that if you drew it, you would end up with a fine gray blob in between all the destinations. A net cloud. That's where the term actually came from.

Re:No more!!

[werfu]

You said yourself, it was a terminal. The computation was done on a mainframe. If the job was dispatched through a bunch of mainframe than it would have been a cloud. Also, how was your computation defined? Having a distributed application doing a specific job isn't cloud processing. Anyway, I think cloud computing has more to do with hype than true conceptual definition.

Re:No more!!

[Nursie]

"Another is that where the mainframe were typically placed close to the workstations, the servers in the cloud can be placed remotely."

Uh, but what about latency? Where we talk about rendering in the cloud we need clients to be as close as possible.

"A third is that the workstations often were unable to function without access to the mainframe, modern desktops are able to use the advantages of the mainframe/cloud as well as the advantages of an autonomous desktop."

Not in every model, specifically not in OnLive and nVidia's model.

The way I see it is that the only real difference is that "the cloud" is basically RAID (and maybe offsite-backup built in) for whole computers rather than just for storage. You use commodity hardware and the utilities of something like vmware to move server images around to where there is less load and bring them back up immediately if there was a problem.

In terms of user experience, it's still client-server.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

the average end-user these days isn't familiar with the idea of doing their computing from a dumb terminal.

Er, I thought most people do use Windows.

Re:No more!!

[cenc]

So, let me see, if I get this right. For some reason my web hosting (collocated dedicated server, visualization, load balancing servers) has just become "cloud computing" because they take place somewhere other than my desktop?

So what the f*** have I been doing for the last 10-15 years? For that matter, anything else that has happened on a network or the Internet over say the last 30 years or more?

It is a silly piece of marketing to rebrand the client / server paradigm.

Re:No more!!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

So, let me see, if I get this right. For some reason my web hosting (collocated dedicated server, visualization, load balancing servers) has just become "cloud computing" because they take place somewhere other than my desktop?

No. They became cloud computing when the servers were doing the job your desktop normally did and you were using your computer as basically just a forwarder for keyboard inputs. Your blog? Not 'cloud'. Using Google Docs? Cloud.

It is a silly piece of marketing to rebrand the client / server paradigm.

I don't really disagree. Can't say my panties are bunched about it, either. Now that we have the masses using these services 'cloud' is easier to pass on to Joe Sixpack than 'client/server-your-work-is-over-there-and-not-over-here'.

In any event, which side of your NIC your program runs on matters. Ignorance of this is comical.

Re:No more!!

[Gordo_1]

Yeah, I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there... I think there are subtle but important differences between the old mainframe approach from the 70s, the kind of hosted computing we had in the 90s and the latest cloud computing stuff.

What I think differentiates cloud computing from earlier iterations of client-server architecture is the ability for a single device to transparently access virtually unlimited (or at least orders of magnitude greater) computing resources with little additional redesign effort. The notion of one-to-one mappings between hardware and software instances is beginning to blur.

Lest I be accused of perpetuating the cloud computing "myth", let me give you some concrete examples.

When you hosted a website at a colo in the 90s, it's true you were borrowing computing resources from somewhere else. However this amounted to getting remote access to a server or cluster of servers. If you wanted to scale that, you had to pay for access to more servers, you had to wait until your colo could stand up enough servers to meet your demand and then you had to configure each server. With cloud offerings like Amazon's EC2 and S3, you are no longer limited by the physical reality of devices. When you sign up for S3, you get access to a geographically diverse, redundant virtual storage partition that is only limited by your imagination, bandwidth capacity, local file system architecture and of course your wallet. EC2 is likewise a virtually limitless blank slate from a computing perspective, allowing you to replicate and grow a web server cluster by 1000x or more in a matter of minutes to perhaps deal with increased traffic flow.

Now, these are but two rather limited examples of what the industry means by cloud computing. I don't think it's so trivial a distinction that you can say it's the same old thing as always.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that it doesn't have to be done via regular old computing. Some of it could even be completed manually (resolving captchas a la google books: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-computers-to-read-google.html). It's an abstraction. You submit a job and it gets completed within a certain timeframe. It doesn't matter if it's running on a mainframe, distributed systems or a bunch of users providing free OCR via a login process. It doesn't matter how many CPU's, HDDs, how much memory, what OS the backend has. That's for them to sort out, as long as you get the service you are paying for, you are happy. Your argument is like saying "I hate it when people talk about high level languages - It's all just machine code"

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

>>>A cloud service is by definition distributed.

A distinction that matters not. A network of computers at some distant Microsoft facility still has the same appearance as a "central computer" from the user's viewpoint, and still offloading workload from a terminal.

>>>Maybe they don't have a quad CPU, and maybe they don't want to buy one.

Yeah but you failed to read the rest of my sentence. Even my single-core ancient Pentium 4 is faster than my 750 kbit/s network connection. It makes more sense to do all the work here, rather than add the latency of a 4000-mile-long roundtrip leg.

(shrug)

I think people who are pursuing cloud computing are about as foolish as somebody who said, "Let's resurrect VAX mainframes and dumb terminals." Just my opinion.

Re:No more!!

[slim]

How about instead of inventing words we just use the ones we have? Rather than "cloud" computing we could just call it internet-based computing, because that's what it is.

Yeah, we could do away with all kinds of pesky specific descriptions, if we just call everything that touches the internet "internet-based computing". I mean, what idiot coined the tedious and unnecessary buzzword "World Wide Web"?

"Cloud computing" has a meaning. If you can't be bothered to know what that meaning is, that's your problem.

Clue:

If you put up a web server and I browse it, that's internet-based computing, but it's not cloud computing.

If your web server performs some processing for me (to stay on topic, let's say I send it a POVray scene, and which your server renders), that's internet-based computing, but it's not cloud computing.

If your "web server" is actually a massively parallel server farm, spread across multiple datacentres worldwide, which splits the POVray rendering job across multiple nodes such that it completes in a fraction of the time and can tolerate individual nodes rebooting or dying altogether -- THAT would be cloud computing.

Likewise Amazon S3 is cloud computing rather than just remote storage, because the data you store is smeared (mirrored; cached) across multiple nodes so that node failure is routed around, and reads are fast for clients all over the world.

Re:No more!!

[frozentier]

There's nothing dumb about it. Multiple raindrops make up a regular cloud, multiple computers make up a computing cloud. Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

Re:No more!!

[slim]

The first is simply a client->server connection, or perhaps hosting your data online. This, I think, doesn't need a new name. The old names were working fine.

The only people using this meaning of "cloud", are people constructing a strawman argument.

"Since cloud computing is simply [insert old concept], it's a pointless buzzword for an old concept".

If it's not dynamically distributing tasks on a large cluster of servers, it's not a cloud.

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

>>>You said yourself, it was a terminal. The computation was done on a mainframe

If I only use my PC to connect to Microsoft.com applications like Cloudword or Cloudexcel, then in effect I've turned my PC into a terminal.

Re:No more!!

[Gorgoth]

ahh so you have never heard people refer to their PC as the CPU or the Hard drive once its been separated from the monitor and other peripherals

Re:No more!!

[slim]

Even my single-core ancient Pentium 4 is faster than my 750 kbit/s network connection

A nonsensical assertion. Instructions/second != bytes/second.

For a computation such as "what is the millionth prime", you'd get the answer faster by going to a faster remote service than you would computing it locally, even if you did it over a 1200 baud modem.

Or, something you probably do more often, a question like "find the most relevant web pages matching these words, from your enormous database".

Re:No more!!

[slim]

The thing that bus me about this 'cloud computing" nonsense is we already had a perfectly good and well established term for this-thin clients.

That would be an excellent point, if only cloud computing and thin-client were related in anything but the most tangential of ways.

But they're not, so it isn't.

5 years from now this will be just another dotbomb buzzword chucked in the trashcan of history

Meanwhile, people are actually using cloud services right now, and they're saving money.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/

These people aren't affected by the ISP caps you mention -- because cloud computing isn't what you think it is.

OTOH, I do think that service aimed at end-users will become popular. Things along the Google Docs model and, yes, the OnLive model. They will drive demand for faster ISP services with higher caps, or no caps at all. And for wireless ISPs with broad coverage.

Re:No more!!

[plague3106]

Its not nonsensical, it makes perfect sense. Why send data to a server to process over a slow link when I could get the result faster by processing that data locally? That's the question he's asking.

Re:No more!!

[plague3106]

Cloud is as private as any other thing you would put on in a web application : Privacy is bound to your service provider usage term. Their tem of use are a contract between you and them.

Ya, so in other worse, there is no privacy.

They are as bound to it as you are, except they have the right to change it anytime and you have the right to refuse the modifications and quit using their service.

And don't forget, lose access to my data. Great, thanks.

If they break their term and for any reason your data end up in someone else hands, than you could always go after your service provider and the one that cause the leak.

Ya, ok. You go sue some huge company and let me know how successful you are.

Now if you fear that your info end-up in the government hands, then you've got a bigger problem than worrying about the cloud.

Right... because if you've got nothing to hide you should show everything to the world, right?

Re:No more!!

[plague3106]

Yeah, we could do away with all kinds of pesky specific descriptions, if we just call everything that touches the internet "internet-based computing". I mean, what idiot coined the tedious and unnecessary buzzword "World Wide Web"?

WWW refers to something specific on the internet; namely that web pages can link to each other even if on another server.

If you put up a web server and I browse it, that's internet-based computing, but it's not cloud computing.

Why isn't it? What if the web server has a web-based mortgage application being served on it? Why isn't that cloud computer? After all, its "doing some processing for me." A plain old web server is "doing some processing for me" as well when it loads the image I requested and sends it to me.

If your "web server" is actually a massively parallel server farm, spread across multiple datacentres worldwide, which splits the POVray rendering job across multiple nodes such that it completes in a fraction of the time and can tolerate individual nodes rebooting or dying altogether -- THAT would be cloud computing.

How is that any different than distributed computing? Oh, because you added "spread across multiple data centers." Please.

Likewise Amazon S3 is cloud computing rather than just remote storage, because the data you store is smeared (mirrored; cached) across multiple nodes so that node failure is routed around, and reads are fast for clients all over the world.

But I thought it had to be doing some processing for me, not just storing stuff? Please, make up your mind. Why throw "smeared" into the mix when you already have the necessary words? Oh right... to make it "cloud compatible."

Re:No more!!

[CarpetShark]

download internets from the email.

Given some of the download times I've seen, I'm pretty sure this has happened once or twice.

Re:No more!!

[TeknoHog]

So, what should I call my atmospheric simulations then?

Re:No more!!

[slim]

Why send data to a server to process over a slow link when I could get the result faster by processing that data locally? That's the question he's asking.

And who is suggesting an application in which you do that?

All the cloud services being offered or suggested offer something on the remote side that you're likely not to have locally. Whether it's massive processing power and access to data (Google search); fast, highly specialised processing power (this Nvidia project); highly redundant cheap storage (Amazon S3); and so on.

I've given two examples of how, even with a fairly fast local processor and a super-slow connection, it would be worth sending a job to a remote server - jobs where the input and output are both small, but the processing in between is heavy and/or further external data is accessed.

Re:No more!!

[werfu]

Who said you're showing everything to the world? Google isn't displaying my email box content to everyone. Sure they admins can access it, but why the f**** would they have to care about my mom asking me how I'm doing. Any service that you use, may it be online or IRL, anyone can gather info about you. Why do everybody live happily without being paranoiac about your grocer stealing your credit card number or selling your nourishment profile to your insurance company that would really love to know if you eat healthy : trust.

You trust your ISP not to repport law enforcement if you go online and download warez. You trust your mechanics for not telling your car insurance company you've been driving with bad break for 10000 miles. You You trust your MD not to tell everyone you've got STD.

Everybody have plenty of stuff to hide but have to share with some. Trust is the base of a relationship. If people don't trust a company, they won't do business with it. Then the company will close its door. If Google would sell your email to third party and that you'd end up with some offer in the real mail for something that you had wrote by email, without ever telling others, I guest you'd close your email account pretty fast.

Now, if you don't trust your cloud computing provider, then why are you doing business with him? Are cloud computing service provider less secure than ordinary webhoster that would offer you a virtual private server? Why don't they deserve the same trust?

Re:No more!!

[slim]

Yeah, we could do away with all kinds of pesky specific descriptions, if we just call everything that touches the internet "internet-based computing". I mean, what idiot coined the tedious and unnecessary buzzword "World Wide Web"?

WWW refers to something specific on the internet; namely that web pages can link to each other even if on another server.

I know. And likewise, cloud computing refers to something specific on the internet.

If you put up a web server and I browse it, that's internet-based computing, but it's not cloud computing.

Why isn't it? What if the web server has a web-based mortgage application being served on it? Why isn't that cloud computer? After all, its "doing some processing for me."

Because that web server isn't benefiting from the fault tolerance or the instant scalability (both up and down), that being in a cloud provides.

If your "web server" is actually a massively parallel server farm, spread across multiple datacentres worldwide, which splits the POVray rendering job across multiple nodes such that it completes in a fraction of the time and can tolerate individual nodes rebooting or dying altogether -- THAT would be cloud computing.

How is that any different than distributed computing? Oh, because you added "spread across multiple data centers." Please.

Sure, it *is* distributed computing (and if it isn't, it's not cloud computing, in my book). Distributed computing + SOA = cloud computing, I guess (although I hate the SOA buzzword as much as you seem to hate "cloud")

Likewise Amazon S3 is cloud computing rather than just remote storage, because the data you store is smeared (mirrored; cached) across multiple nodes so that node failure is routed around, and reads are fast for clients all over the world.

But I thought it had to be doing some processing for me, not just storing stuff? Please, make up your mind. Why throw "smeared" into the mix when you already have the necessary words? Oh right... to make it "cloud compatible."

Storage is processing. In this case the process is to store the data on at least two nodes, send you an acknowledgement, then in the background propogate it to more nodes. I just used the word "smeared" (not part of the standard cloud buzzword collection as fat as I knew) because I thought it might help people understand.

Re:No more!!

[ProzacPatient]

I agree with this. In reality "cloud" computing is just mainframe computing. Its a step backward really.

Re:No more!!

[hierophanta]

In any event, which side of your NIC your program runs on matters.

FTW!!!!!!

Re:No more!!

[glarbl_blarbl]

I've heard the term used before in this context by my local newspaper, but it's stealing from the audio engineering business. Phantom Power has been available in microphone preamps to power condenser (really capacitor, but we still call 'em condensers) mics for 45 years.

Re:No more!!

[rantingkitten]

For one thing, it's annoying because it's almost exactly the same as the mainframe-terminal model, which has been around for decades. Calling it a "cloud" in an effort to make it sound modern and sexy is just marketing drivel and makes it sound like it's something new and fresh, leading to really idiotic decisions from management who would snort at the notion of going back to mainframes but really, really want to be on top of this new "cloud" thing.

Also, it is not an important distinction for many of the applications for which it's proposed, specifically, things aimed at the end user. Johnny Punchclock and Suzie Timesheet barely understand what a computer is anyway -- do you think they care that their spreadsheet calculations are being performed at another location and then being updated on their screen, versus being performed on the mysterious blinking box on the floor under the desk? Do you think they know or care whether their documents are being saved on "the hard drive", which is another mysterious term to them, or being stored on some distributed, nebulous "cloud"?

They don't care, their managers are clueless, and so much cloud crap is just garbage. "The cloud" differs from the mainframes of yore in only one important aspect that I can determine -- its potential for scalability and near-instant rollout of additional "servers". But very few business or applications need or, indeed, can even take advantage of that.

It's an important distinction for the IT jockeys who will be administrating this stuff, but since when does anyone listen to us when we say "This is a bad idea"?

Re:No more!!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

For one thing, it's annoying because it's almost exactly the same as the mainframe-terminal model, which has been around for decades. Calling it a "cloud" in an effort to make it sound modern and sexy is just marketing drivel and makes it sound like it's something new and fresh...

It's almost exactly the same except for the whole 'being on the internet' thing. That distinction is not so subtle.

do you think they care that their spreadsheet calculations are being performed at another location and then being updated on their screen, versus being performed on the mysterious blinking box on the floor under the desk?

Yes. Look at how many people have Hotmail accounts.

"The cloud" differs from the mainframes of yore in only one important aspect that I can determine -- its potential for scalability and near-instant rollout of additional "servers".

Really? That's all the differentiation you can see? You think a business wouldn't see much difference between using Google Docs on-line and using a Google Docs server in their own building?

but since when does anyone listen to us when we say "This is a bad idea"?

Why would they? It's not like they're being told it's a bad idea by somebody sees the difference between a mainframe and a server on the internet.

Everything is a 'bad idea' on Slashdot. That's how people earn Insightful mods.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I constantly hear people refering to a PC as a Hard Drive. This drives me aboslutely mad, epecially when you try to diagnose a problem and the customer reporting the problem says "my hard-drive" is no longer working.

Re:No more!!

[TheOldFart]

Yes indeed. Here in Soviet Russia, the power phantoms have hitherto unreported you to science.

Re:No more!!

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh...you DO know that this article is about Nvidia, yes? And that having full motion video at 720p at 60fps is gonna chew through the bandwidth, yes? Sure you can point out one or two where "cloud computing" is working, just as there was some success stories with the thin client model.

That does NOT change the fact that you can take most press releases involving cloud computing and replace the above with "on the Internet!" and it would fit in perfectly with any buzzword bingo press release of the mid to late 90s. I'm gonna make a prediction-three years from now a good 97% of those "cloud computing" bunches will be tits up, most probably boning customers data while they are at it, and folks will still be using the desktop/laptop for a good 90% of their needs.

And if you think American ISPs are just gonna build pipes for bunches like OnLive without going to an assraping tiered pricing model well I just have to say.....BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Can I have some of what you are smoking dude? Hell my local duopoly haven't moved a single fricking foot in ANY direction in damned near 25 years, yeah I really see all these duopolies with NO competition just rushing right out to run those fat pipes...BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Hold on to THAT dream pal!

Re:No more!!

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Well in my day it was called a mainframe, which was then upgraded to have 64 cpus, and it was in a different city, which was then linked with another 3 mainframes. Cloud computing is a stupid buzzword, its almost as stupid as saying we don't know how to program a multi core computer.

It may be a distinction... But not a new or relevant one unless you have been living under a rock for the last 20 years.

Re:No more!!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

It may be a distinction... But not a new or relevant one unless you have been living under a rock for the last 20 years.

Okay, you're right. We're still doing things exactly the way we were back in 1989.

Re:No more!!

[IBBoard]

Why do everybody live happily without being paranoiac about your grocer stealing your credit card number

Because they can see who they are and know that they are a person with an actual investment in something who can legally and easily be tracked down.

or selling your nourishment profile to your insurance company that would really love to know if you eat healthy.

It depends whether it gets them bonus points. They don't generally tie transactions to cards/people in a way that they use, but people will quite happily get a "loyalty card" that is mainly used for data mining so that they can get a few discounts.

You trust your ISP not to repport law enforcement if you go online and download warez.

(Ignoring the fact I don't do it) I don't trust them on a "they have an interest in my privacy", I just know that they don't want to become liable for all of the other illegal activity that occurs that they don't catch.

You trust your mechanics for not telling your car insurance company you've been driving with bad break for 10000 miles.

Probably mainly because they don't have a clue, plus what difference does it make to the mechanic anyway?

You You trust your MD not to tell everyone you've got STD.

Only as professional ethics, and there are certain conditions where even that doesn't hold.

Are cloud computing service provider less secure than ordinary webhoster that would offer you a virtual private server? Why don't they deserve the same trust?

It depends on what you're trusting them with. Cloud is a nice idea for some people, but there is still a certain sub-set of organisations that wouldn't even trust a VPS or any other system that involves their proprietary and very valuable information going outside their network. In that way 'Cloud' isn't much different to other services.

Re:No more!!

[FreakyGreenLeaky]

Yeah, I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there

That really tickled my funnybone, thanks. I can just imagine that infuriating dickwad manager in Office Space with the eternal cup of coffee in his hand...

Re:No more!!

[middlemen]

My own computer may "only" be a Pentium 4, but it's still about 12,000 times faster than the old 8-bit machine where I used to write book reports.

Cloud computing isn't for everyone. It is for those who want to use their age old Pentium 3's and 4's with old sound cards and graphics cards, and still have a Vista or Windows 7 experience despite having an age old machine that can barely support XP with elan.
So if I have a P4 machine that works perfect for me, but I want to have a Vista/Win7 machine without the hassle of buying a new machine itself costing around 500$ or more, I can have everything be done in a cloud. That way, I can always work with the latest and greatest versions of OSes if available and have hardly any hardware costs. Plus the beauty of buying a cheap netbook and have it work like a high end desktop.

Re:No more!!

[plague3106]

All the cloud services being offered or suggested offer something on the remote side that you're likely not to have locally. Whether it's massive processing power and access to data (Google search); fast, highly specialised processing power (this Nvidia project); highly redundant cheap storage (Amazon S3); and so on

Computers are already more powerful than most people need. Search I'll grant you.. it'd be hard to index the web with only my computer. But is that really cloud? Doesn't seem to fit the bill. As for storage, that's already cheap too, and while it may be convient to have another company hold my personal data, it certainly doesn't make me feel good to store it there.

Cloud computing is a junk buzzword, and hopefully the latest Tmobile scafu will make it crystal clear to everyone why its junk.

Oh... and your search example the input is not small, as you must count the index as an input as well.

Re:No more!!

[plague3106]

Google isn't displaying my email box content to everyone.

Unless google isn't careful with it. I mean, its not like any arbitrary gmail user could ever read another gmail user's email, right? Or unless they are subpoenaed. Because thats JUST like needing a warrant.

Sure they admins can access it, but why the f**** would they have to care about my mom asking me how I'm doing.

Ya, you clearly fail understanding human nature.

Any service that you use, may it be online or IRL, anyone can gather info about you.

Which is why I'll keep as much of it as I can local. Oh, and if you cant see the difference about a paper file at some local joint and google's internet connected data store, I don't know what to tell you.

Why do everybody live happily without being paranoiac about your grocer stealing your credit card number or selling your nourishment profile to your insurance company that would really love to know if you eat healthy : trust.

Because there are safeguards. For one, the CC company DOESN'T GET A LIST OF ITEMS I BOUGHT. Second, the damage is limited; I can dispute the charge and get my money back. Once something is on the net though, its gone for good. Also, my insurance doesn't know where I shop.

You trust your ISP not to repport law enforcement if you go online and download warez.

No I don't. Which isn't the reason I don't download warez, I don't do that because I'm not a scumbag that likes to take without consideration.

You trust your mechanics for not telling your car insurance company you've been driving with bad break for 10000 miles.

Bad brakes quickly fail, I hate to inform you. Clearly you don't own a car or pay for auto insurance. Also, you assume someone would knowningly drive with bad brakes. That's just plain stupid, because you're putting your life in danger. People may be really stupid, but they almost always can be counted on to watch out for themselves.

You You trust your MD not to tell everyone you've got STD.

No I don't, and neither did anyone else, which is why we have strong protections called HIPPA.

Trust is the base of a relationship. If people don't trust a company, they won't do business with it.

Well that's not true. I don't trust my bank, I demand a statement each month. I demand an itemized bill for car repairs. I've even demanded to see the replaced part and where they installed the new part. And none of this goes on on the internet, which has a habit of never forgetting.

If Google would sell your email to third party and that you'd end up with some offer in the real mail for something that you had wrote by email, without ever telling others, I guest you'd close your email account pretty fast.

After the damage is already done? What good is that?

Now, if you don't trust your cloud computing provider, then why are you doing business with him? Are cloud computing service provider less secure than ordinary webhoster that would offer you a virtual private server? Why don't they deserve the same trust?

I don't, which is why I do most things locally. The only things I do online already have force of law if they don't function as I expect them to. You clearly miss the big picture; most of a company (or my own) data ISN'T on some web server already. Its safely on MY COMPANY'S (or MY) server. And thats where the cloud fails.

Re:No more!!

[slim]

Search I'll grant you.. it'd be hard to index the web with only my computer. But is that really cloud? Doesn't seem to fit the bill.

Search is absolutely the archetypal cloud application. If you don't think search is cloud, you've misunderstood what cloud is.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop talking about "cloud" computing -- it is one of the dumbest buzzwords I have ever heard in my entire life -- not to mention the fact that it is a totally meaningless term.

No it's not meaningless. That's like saying that if I have an application that creates a specific output, and someone writes a service that does the same thing that the service is useless along with all services because we already have applications. The service is hardware agnostic. It can run on any platform an still produce results. The same applies here.

Why cluster an instance of SQL for that matter?! Who needs all that redundancy and security? Freakin losers! (sarcasm)

A cloud is a computing model served to you from a widely redundant hardware and network subsystem, often employing virtualized applications, servers, or appliances to accomplish this. It's not the same old thing revisited. It is far more dynamic and the fact that you barely understand it doesn't make it useless.

reinforce your geek cred, use google, and figure this crap out before you chime in on the subject.

Re:No more!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the writer of RoadToFailure. I have a CS degree and read quite a few computing history books.

I'm not going to debate you here... but thanks for inspiring a new article! "Cloud Computing is NOT The New Mainframe". I love Slashdot.

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

>>>All the cloud services being offered or suggested offer something on the remote side that you're likely not to have locally.
>>>

I was under the impression it's mostly about making me go to microsoft.com to use an online word processor or spreadsheet, instead of having the programs stored locally. To me that seems silly.

Re:No more!!

[commodore64_love]

Still don't see why I would goto microsoft.com and use CloudWord or CloudExcel when I can use these programs right here locally from c:

Re:No more!!

[slim]

I was under the impression it's mostly about making me go to microsoft.com to use an online word processor or spreadsheet, instead of having the programs stored locally.

Very much not the focus.

Although I use Google Docs by preference nowadays -- no installation, easy collaboration, equally accessible from home, work, internet cafe etc. What they have remotely that I don't have locally is redundant storage.

Re:No more!!

[plague3106]

Search is distributed. The fact that some servers are no in the same physical location is irrelevent. What new technology enables servers to be physically decentrialized? Nothing, that's already been there.

Cloud is a nonsense term used by people as marketing. I completely understand what it is; its the next SOA, the next meanlingless buzzword.

Re:No more!!

[mehrotra.akash]

wont "Internets" be incorrect as internet is a collection of networks, so Internets=collection of networks=internet

internet after all is a network as well.

Brought to you by the letter G for Greedy.

[TimeElf1]

And how much is this going to cost the end user? Just so we can have realistic clouds? No one looks at the clouds. How about realistic trees instead?

Re:Brought to you by the letter G for Greedy.

[BitZtream]

Such a hurry to post you didn't even read the summary, not even the first sentence.

Its about cloud computing, not rendering cloud images.

Bad idea!

[oo_HAWK_oo]

And then what happens when your kid fires up his bit torrent!?

Re:Bad idea!

[Yvan256]

The rendering of clouds in the cloud computing will stop.

With 31% chances of rain.

Question

[dorpus]

For all the talk of "cloud computing", are there publicly available data sets from Google (or other companies)? I'm a graduate student interested in data mining of health outcomes data. My biggest challenge remains the fact that HIPAA and other patient privacy concerns make it very difficult to obtain health outcomes data; it's still a 1980s world where data are granted through official channels after extensive paperwork, or as a favor from people who trust me.

Re:Question

[TheKidWho]

Maybe those patients don't want you to know anything about themselves?

Re:Question

[slim]

OK, so you've been modded offtopic.

But I'm curious why you thought a question about publically available datasets had anything to do with cloud computing? It doesn't look as if you were trolling. So what was it you were misunderstanding?

Re:Question

[commodore64_love]

Yes for example if my records are opened, it will be discovered my IQ is only 90, and I may lose my engineering job. Shhh.

Re:Question

[Sockatume]

You realise that those restrictions are the only reason that the data could be gathered in the first place, right? People won't allow their information to be disclosed at all unless there's some reassurance about what will be done with it. Maybe you should collaborate with somebody who can get access instead of trying to work around it, if only for your own good. It's not good for your career to be known as "the guy who stole all that private medical data and wrote a paper with it". The journals frown upon ethics violations.

I don't know...

[gijoel]

The last thing I want to see why I'm playing a FPS is buffering.... 32%

Re:I don't know...

[im_thatoneguy]

Reality server is designed to deliver single frames for visualization not interactive games. The acceleration structures would make it pretty much useless for a video game with lots of deforming meshes. The applications are things like an Ikea website where you can build your living room, place furniture and see a photo realistic rendering of the outcome without waiting a few minutes would be required on a local machine without a render farm.

Re:I don't know...

[slim]

The applications are things like an Ikea website where you can build your living room, place furniture and see a photo realistic rendering of the outcome without waiting a few minutes would be required on a local machine without a render farm.

THIS!

Once you start thinking like that, potential applications start leaping out at you.

There's also the web site where you write type in a script with camera directions, and it renders it into a speech-synth-narrated machinima (I forget the name). This technology could vastly improve both the quality and the responsiveness of such a site.

Pay to Play?

[zcold]

Awesome! So instead of buying a video card, I will now have an option to pay yet another monthly fee to play games? Im so excited!

Re:Pay to Play?

[Sockatume]

Think of it as paying for everyone else's video cards. On credit. Forever.

Re:Pay to Play?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's ten bucks a month, it'll be less than my investment in video cards.

Re:Pay to Play?

[Anonymous Coward]

Credit? That means it isn't my money! Sweet deal!

Re:Pay to Play?

[Comatose51]

That's a bit of a knee jerk reaction. What if the monthly fee was $1 a month? Instead of continuously upgrading every year or so, you pay $12 a year to have the greatest and latest without having to do any of the work yourself. It's also pretty attractive to game developers because they can assume that all their customers are running on the same 3D rendering platform and can be sure that everyone will have the same experience. Until we know the cost of the service, it seems premature to judge its usefulness. I know telcos have left a bad impression on paid services but not all recurring fees are bad. Electricity and water are for most part pretty reliable services that we pay for monthly.

Re:Pay to Play?

[zcold]

HA., a dollar a month... Lolz.. Sorry if I sound like a jerk but I hardly doubt we would see any prices like that... keep dreaming of a perfect world.. business is business because it makes money.... lots of money...

Re:Pay to Play?

[Sockatume]

Someone has to pay for the computer eventually.

Re:Pay to Play?

[Comatose51]

Just to be clear, not calling you a jerk. What I said was "knee jerk" reaction, as in just a reaction you get because of some gut feeling. Now that reaction might turn out to be correct but I think we should reserve judgment until we see the price tag. $1 is of course unrealistic but maybe NVidia might surprise us with some genuine innovation that makes that kind of price possible.

Re:Pay to Play?

[3vi1]

OnLive won't be $1 a month. With the amount of bandwidth they'll be paying for, plus the higher server-end requirements, I'll be shocked if it's under $12 a month. I wouldn't be surprised to see it as high as $24.99 a month or beyond.

Imagine fees inline with the concept of "interactive cable TV".

Re:Pay to Play?

[zcold]

that would be nice... fyi the jerk thing was about me laughing at your initial response...

Re:Pay to Play?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, we heard you liked paying to play, so we put a pay to play charge on your hardware so you can pay to play while you pay to play!

Re:Pay to Play?

[dkf]

Awesome! So instead of buying a video card, I will now have an option to pay yet another monthly fee to play games? Im so excited!

Not just that, you also get to have much worse latency too! Yay!

This really is pointless!

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to hand off rendering a high-quality photorealistic image to an offite server, then download the result - an ultra-high quality image, and you think this is going to be faster and rendering locally?

For an onsite gigabit lan, I'm willing to believe that. But most of us have small pipes connecting to the cloud. I bet it would be faster to render locally than to render remotely with upload & download time included.

Incomparable to OnLive - different goals

[Animaether]

NVidia's offering performs full scene raytracing/pathtracing, with effects ranging from reflections and refractions to global illumination and caustics all the way through to sub-surface scattering and participating media.

Some of these things can be done in proper realtime (say, at least, 30fps at 720p) on existing GPUs, but typically by using hacks that look 'good enough', but aren't actually correct. Which is fine for gaming (where refresh rates matter), but not fine for product visualization, architectural visualization or to go to an extreme.. materials and lighting analysis, where you don't care if it's not 30fps, but are more than happy to wait 10 seconds for something that used to take 15 minutes.

That said... if the cards keep getting faster, then eventually 30fps@720p will be possible and there's no reason, in the time inbetween, that games couldn't add the more fancy effects and have the GPGPU solutions take care of those on a 'cloud' platform.

mod parent up!!

[A12m0v]

I would if I had mod points. Parent is spot on, we've transitioned away from "cloud computing" when we moved from mainframe terminals to desktop workstations, why would we want to go backwards?

Re:mod parent up!!

[Sockatume]

Nothing for the end user that can't be accomplished through plain old offline data synchronisation, if you're patient. For the computer provider, it gives them control over your upgrade pattern and what features you have to pay for. You can hardly save money by not bothering to upgrade the CPU and RAM on the purely conceptual machine hundreds of miles away that you rent time from: if the cloud is getting its quarterly upgrade, it's happening, and you're paying for it.

Return Of The Mainframe!

[jabjoe]

It's that time in the cycle where we talk about thin clients and the mainframe again. Own nothing, rent everything, submit to central control. You know what, just like the last few times, I'll pass.

YOUR RENDER FARM ESPLODE!

[Foktip]

Um, arent they discontinuing their high-end products because they overheat and explode?
So like, are they gonna use ATI cards for this or something? LOL :P

Re:YOUR RENDER FARM ESPLODE!

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

End of the upgrade path?

[Picass0]

So if the GPU become a glorified web client how will they keep soaking everyone for a (bi)yearly card upgrade? If all of the most complex tasks are handed off to a remote server that's where the upgrades should be handled.

Also if part of the secret sauce is being handled remotely NVidia has no further excuses for keeping it's linux drivers closed.

Re:End of the upgrade path?

[RealErmine]

So if the GPU become a glorified web client how will they keep soaking everyone for a (bi)yearly card upgrade?

Oh, but there's a better revenue stream here: subscription fees.

Re:End of the upgrade path?

[Sockatume]

Well, now you get soaked for the upgrade whether you want/need it or not. That's the rub.

Re:End of the upgrade path?

[imakemusic]

Lets see...I couldn't find any mention of price but, well £5(GBP) per month sounds like a reasonably low figure. My last graphics card was about £60. I buy one roughly every two years.

£5 x 24 months = £120

They're twice as better of with me renting this tech. Plus I'm going to need some compatible hardware to receive it on...

Won't work in some areas

[Yvan256]

There is still this thing called "bandwidth quota" where you get overcharged to death if you go over it. As an example, say 40$/month for 50GB, then 10$ per additional GB.

And please no stupid "change ISP" comments, a lot of people aren't lucky enough to even have a choice of high-speed providers. It's either high-speed cable/DSL, or dial-up. Sometimes from the same ISP, even.

Re:Won't work in some areas

[torchdragon]

Perhaps you could call my condo association and have them reverse their decision to disallow Verizon's deployment of FIOS.

You're right though, I suppose I should just be asking myself "Have you thought about changing residences?"

That makes a lot of sense just to play a video game, way more sense than going to NewEgg and buying a new video card for my computer.

Re:Won't work in some areas

[MozeeToby]

Fine be me, if NVIDIA thinks they can make this work it'll be just one more industry supporting net neutrality. Maybe we should encourage more and more industries to implement high bandwidth, questionably useful technologies. Eventually, the lobby money from the Net Neutrality group will be greater than the lobby money from the Telcos/ISP group.

Re:Won't work in some areas

[Anonymous Coward]

Great point! This would definitely impact tube usage - I can kind of see two arguments developing on the side of net neutrality advocates and big corporate media tycoons. On one hand the big media cats can state something like this type of use will augment the need for differential services and fees to help them push more through the pipes, on the other hand net neutrality peeps can argue that this demonstrates a need for a neutral net as innovation like this should not be corporately regulated.

Personally, I'm wondering what Nividia's position on this would be.

Re:Won't work in some areas

[Monkeedude1212]

But doesn't the target of Cloud Rendering mean that one day I can have my own render farm set up to run a game? For example the minimum requirement specs for a game could be "20 Rendering GPU's running to a total of X speed" instead of "Nvidia Card X or greater" ?

Re:Won't work in some areas

[chameleon_skin]

And please no stupid "change ISP" comments, a lot of people aren't lucky enough to even have a choice of high-speed providers. It's either high-speed cable/DSL, or dial-up. Sometimes from the same ISP, even.

You should just change ISPs.

Latency

[gr8_phk]

That said... if the cards keep getting faster, then eventually 30fps@720p will be possible and there's no reason, in the time inbetween, that games couldn't add the more fancy effects and have the GPGPU solutions take care of those on a 'cloud' platform.

There's one big reason - latency. 30 FPS is one frame every 33.333ms. What's your ping time? Add the rendering time to that, and that's what your interactivity is going to look like. Remember that many games have ways of hiding the latency between client and server - in particular they know the players POV and the static environment, so those things can be handled very well.

As someone else said, cloud rendering is fine for making movies. It's not viable for games. And besides, if a GPU can do this stuff in real time, why do we need to push it into the cloud? This sounds like OTOY all over again.

BTW, CPUs will be doing realtime ray tracing soon anyway - give me a bunch of bulldozer cores and a frame buffer.

Re:Latency

[Sockatume]

It'll be fine for people who're happy with low-grade graphics that existing hardware can do quickly enough for the latency to be the limit, or gameplay which is not in real-time. Unfortunately this is a market that probably won't see the point in signing up to the service in the first place, and could be just as easily served by a cheap local box.

Re:Latency

[natehoy]

What if the game server also had the GPU engine on board for all of the clients?

Current case: Game server tells client "you are at coordinates X,Y,Z within the game, you're facing this way, the following is happening in front of you, etc". Client takes all of that an renders a local copy of the game map to match what the server says.

New case: Game server sends game imagery as compressed streaming video and audio for each client, and receives back motion/command instructions from client. All of the calculations and rendering are done on the centralized server, clients are just looking at the equivalent of streaming video.

Sure, it would require a pretty high-bandwidth connection, but as long as the client could render fixed (2D) images quickly, the remote server would do all the tricky 3D rendering and just stream the results to the client. So you're a lot less hardware-dependent for each gaming client. This could be a huge win for LAN parties.

I don't see this as absolutely revolutionary, but for certain things, it could be pretty significant. No loading custom maps to individual gaming stations, because the maps are all on the server. Gamers could sit on pretty low-end hardware (not even requiring a 3D rendering engine). The client software could be measured in kilobytes or maybe megabytes instead of gigabytes like it is today.

You just need some very heavy-duty hardware for a server, and some serious upstream capacity coming from that server. But gaming companies could practically give away (or maybe completely give away) the clients and charge a monthly fee for access to servers.

Re:Latency

[hey]

Cool for small computers (iPod touch, iPhone, cell phone, netbooks) that don't have GPUs.

Re:Latency

[Jthon]

I assume it's "in the cloud" for the same reason people outsource other tasks. The architect doesn't need to invest in the hardware/software platform and a render farm. Instead they contract the work out and don't need to worry about the technical details. This is not much different than what many people do today only instead of getting some static images back they get an interactive utility.

Re:Latency

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you still have exactly the same latency problem he described.

Re:Latency

[Jeremy Erwin]

*20,000 frames included in monthly fee. Additional frames are charged at $0.004 per frame

Re:Latency

[Animaether]

There's one big reason - latency.

Not all games are twitchy FPSs and racing games though; and not every element in even *those* games has to be calculated for instant feedback.

Let's say you have a flamethrower in a game. You need to be able to see where the flames are going, and where your enemies are going, 'immediately' so that you can get a good kill.

But all the indirect lighting from those flames bouncing around in the scene lagging behind by, say, 150ms would be perfectly acceptable.

e.g. offload the intensive bits and pieces to the cloud, rather than the entire thing.

Although the entire thing would be possible in due time as well - players are already playing with lag; lag induced from rendering off-site is minimal compared to the hops between you and the average game server. Bandwidth is a far bigger concern; especially when you consider more and more ISPs introducing caps.

As far as CPUs go.. oh, absolutely, they'll get ever more powerful especially after Larrabee. But the games get more demanding as well. So now you need a new CPU, but it uses a different socket, so you get a new motherboard, turns out your old cooling fan won't fit, beside.. the TDP of the new CPU is 120W, so you'll need a watercooling solution anyway, etc. etc.
There's a lot of reasons why 'gaming on the cloud' ( I do hate that term. ) can be a good thing (from the technical up above, to the energy efficiency, to technical support, to non-invasive anti-cheating constructions), just as there are down sides to it (potential for lag, slurps bandwidth, no resale options, game could be abandoned at any point and you'll have no recourse, etc.).

But to state it's doomed before it's even launched... hmm. Let's have them give it a shot, first?

And so...

[inode_buddha]

Now you can get tele-fragged by a n00b even faster, thereby enabling greater synergies for e-presence and brand recognition!

Latency?

[kalirion]

So, even if I had the the bandwidth to upload graphic data (geometry, textures, etc) and download 1080p video in realtime without any buffering, my 5ms Monitor would now have to deal with at least 30ms in video latency?

Oblig. Penny Arcade

[RealErmine]

It happens in the sky:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/3/25/

Great...

[Dorsai65]

A big-ass binary hairball to further clog the tubes.

How much additional traffic is this going to add to all the other interactive high-bandwidth stuff transiting the infrastructure?

Re:Great...

[nschubach]

From TFA:

NVIDIA fielded a question on this topic during the Q&A session, and insists that RealityServer applications will have a bandwidth footprint equal to or less than that of a YouTube video stream, and it erred on the side of "less." Assuming this is true, the new services should have little to no effect on current-generation networks.

Though, I had to disagree... We aren't talking about a tiny YouTube video screen here, I want full pixel 1920x1200 x 16bit x 60fps (at least) rendering, and I doubt that's less than a YouTube video.

So long render farm and thank for all the CG fish

[w3irdizum]

I manage and maintain a 200+ dual quad VFX render farm at the moment...I'll go get my coat. In all seriousness I've been expecting this for quite a while, ever since Nvidia brought mental images. But I cant help remembering that Intel were the ones shouting about ray-tracing cards , Nvidia was all about what ever works even if its a cheat... so ill hold fire on looking for a new job till I see some real world results.. Buttons aren't toys.

Bandwidth & Latency?

[Nethemas the Great]

Backbone and last-mile providers are already crying about filesharers overburdening the infrastructure, especially here in the U.S.. ISPs in the U.S. typically devote well more than 95% of capacity to downstream traffic to try and cope. The modern graphics card works on a bandwidth spoken in terms of GB/s. There's no way a 50 FPS+ 1080p or better video feed from a rendering farm could be supported for every console user. While not needing as high of resolution, mobile devices communicate off of cellular networks that make in-ground network capacity problems seem petty. Even if these could be remedied, the latency involved in even a same city rendering farm would still make for a lack-luster experience.

Re:Bandwidth & Latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

That much bandwidth isn't required between the client and the server(s). That amount of bandwidth only matters inside the server where the rendering takes place.

Have you ever watched video on hulu.com? The quality is pretty good over US broadband. Sending video that is generated by a computer would take the same amount of bandwidth as hulu.com (assuming that the video is compressed at the server in real time). In the other direction, all that needs to be sent out from your computer to the server are your mouse movements and keystrokes, which don't require much bandwidth at all.

Re:Bandwidth & Latency?

[Sockatume]

Highlighting how consumer internet companies have oversold their capacity could be a benefit, mind you. If people get oversold on flights they get some sort of comeback, maybe people whose internet is unusuable when the sun's up would start to ask for a discount.

Re:Bandwidth & Latency?

[Jthon]

Which is why this isn't currently targeted at the gaming market (though there is some startup doing "streaming" games, I forget their name but you can play crysis!). The target here is for tasks which used to be sent off to render farms for a day or two and would return a half dozen high resolution pictures. Previously the architect had to anticipate all the possible views/angles that their clients wanted to see.

Now you can get the same high quality ray-traced graphics in almost real time which allows the architect to change the view, lighting, etc based on the clients feedback. Heck you could even just give a pointer to your client and let them play around with in their "virtual" building without requiring them sit at your office.

The other option is to go buy a bunch of NVIDIA quadroplex boards and setup your own render machine, but now you're tied to showing everything off to people in person, on your one machine.

Re:Bandwidth & Latency?

[BitZtream]

Video cards need high bandwidth to get textures, models and arrays into memory when needed. If the server farm already has all this in memory, then your just updating some state arrays to indicate the state of those objects, which lowers your bandwidth drastically.

Your video subsystem has massive amounts of bandwidth to deal with the instantaneous needs that require huge amounts when the scene changes completely. If you're just standing there in some game, looking at the same spot and not moving, almost no bandwidth is required. Likewise, if your card has enough memory to store all the models, textures and other data onboard, your bandwidth usage drops drastically and your frame rates stay high.

If Quake 16 is designed to use a server farm elsewhere to render itself, then theres a good chance that server farm elsewhere is also going to be smart enough to have all the assets stored locally rather than having the client PC resend them all the time.

This sort of thing would be great for small movie makes to get some rendering time, but games aren't going this way any time soon, just like Office isn't going all web based any time soon. Any of us in the industry for a while have already been down that road, and it sucks at the worst possible time.

Re:Bandwidth & Latency?

[BitZtream]

The servers have to get the scene assets somehow. That is why modern video cards use high bandwidth PCI Express slots, so the assets of the scene can be sent quickly when needed without adding delay.

Just displaying the video is pretty low bandwidth compared to that, although if you were to try and feed me video over the internet for the same resolution that I play games at, I'd need at least 4 times the bandwidth Time Warner lets me burst to right now. 4 times probably won't cut it since you rarely ever get those speeds, and never for an extended period of time.

Video requires far more bandwidth than you realize, even when you are just playing a movie in high quality.

Hulu is low quality. Just because it looks okay when they display it in a tiny area of your web browser doesn't mean its high quality or needs much bandwidth. Icons can look awesome, even if they are 32x32 pixels, as long as you don't try to display them fullscreen.

Re:Bandwidth & Latency?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Real time encoding still requires *much* more bandwidth to look any good and can add a lot to latency. Live digital tv looks like block land with current encoding rates and hulu doesn't get close to the quality of a dvd unless you like the fuzzy "deblocking" filter look. Why would I get a HighDef monitor just to render 16x16 pixel blocks? If you are going to call it high def then give me high def, don't just colour in all the pixels...and no one will use a service with 600x800 anymore.

Problem with this

[Anonymous Coward]

in regards to online gaming:

latency, latency...

latency.

OnLive similarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Doing graphics work in real-time is OnLive's department. I wonder what the patent status of this will be - OnLive filed a fair few - although I don't know which specific bits they cover. Should be interesting to see which company can deliver.

On your marks, get set....!

[Fishbulb]

Ok, it's time everybody! Break those old Sun SparcStation ELC's and SLC's out of storage!

Oh, wait, you don't have one? How about all those SunRays you've got in the garage?

No?

Right.

Re:On your marks, get set....!

[walshy007]

How about all those SunRays you've got in the garage?

The SunRays are sitting on top of my sun enterprise rack in my room, you insensitive clod! (not kidding, behind me to my right :) )

I'd rather have the cloud in my house.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bad enough to have wait for servers to come back up for the various apps and games, but to have to wait for your Nvidia loggin before you can use your monitor would be unbearable.

Now applying this tech to a server that I have sitting in my closet that let's me use my SLI/Crossfire set-up on any TV or monitor in my house without having to builld a computer for each one, now I'm starting to get interested.

These days everyone in the house want to be able to use a computer, having a single one that can throw it's resources around to multiple terminals would save me a lot of money and hassel, but screw paying yet another monthly fee for a service that can be easily provided on site.

Hard to imagine a worse idea...

[MpVpRb]

This is marketoid-think at its worst.

Graphic rendering requires very low latency.

Of all the things that might be done in the "cloud", realtime graphics is the silliest.

But, the marketoids have been convinced that the "cloud" is the future, so they invent nonsense scenarios where their products can be used.

Wouldn't it be cool if...

[Karem Lore]

1) We all had free, unrestricted and unlimited fast Internet links...
2) Our GPU could pull on the idle processing power of all GPUs in the world...
3) Everyone in the world got on with each other...(ok ok, off-topic here)...

Seriously though, there is no way that one could support the network requirements of this...How many Nvidia GPUs are sold a year? F***ing eh...multiply that by the bandwidth require for 25-50fps for a 1080p image...the number is frightening.

Onlive does the same thing already

[Anonymous Coward]

Onlive is already doing similar thing!

NVIDIA Real-Time Photorealism on today's GPUs

[morganmcguire]

If you don't want to wait for the power of their GPU servers, check out a recent project I did with NVIDIA for ray tracing realistic illumination on today's desktops:

http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/PhotonHPG09/

From the abstract, "Image Space Photon Mapping (ISPM) rasterizes a light-space bounce map of emitted photons surviving initial-bounce Russian roulette sampling on a GPU. It then traces photons conventionally on the CPU. Traditional photon mapping estimates final radiance by gathering photons from a k-d tree. ISPM instead scatters indirect illumination by rasterizing an array of photon volumes. Each volume bounds a filter kernel based on the a priori probability density of each photon path. These two steps exploit the fact that initial path segments from point lights and final ones into a pinhole camera each have a common center of projection. An optional step uses joint bilateral upsampling of irradiance to reduce the fill requirements of rasterizing photon volumes. ISPM preserves the accurate and physically-based nature of photon mapping, supports arbitrary BSDFs, and captures both high- and low-frequency illumination effects such as caustics and diffuse color interreflection. "

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