One view of the future holds that the world will end up with just a handful of massive distributed computers, under the control of companies like Google.
If so, then we could be getting there faster than you think.
According to Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid, around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies – he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon. That is an amazing statistic, and certainly not one I’d heard before. And this is before cloud computing has really caught on in a big way.
It sounds like an awful lot of computing power to throw at amateur video and would-be replacements for Microsoft’s Office. Rashid, who was speaking at a small dinner in San Francisco last night, suggested one or two more constructive ways this massive new computing resource might be used.
For instance, the ability to assemble truly vast sets of data in one place and crunch them all at once could transform science. If all the data collected by all the AIDS organisations around the world were centralised, what more could be learnt that isn’t already known? This Utopian vision faces at least one big hindrance, though, as Rashid cautioned: many researchers feel extremely proprietary about the data they collect. How many are prepared to contribute them to a single open database for the common good?
Rashid says it’s too soon to speculate on all the ways the handful of globally distributed mega-computers will change the world. But he adds this: every time there’s a transition to a new computer architecture, there’s a tendency simply to assume that existing applications will be carried over (ie, word processors in the cloud). But the new architecture actually makes possible many new applications that had never been thought of, and these are the ones that go on to define the next stage of computing.
