Future clouds: low-energy boxes, immersive services

The world is becoming a giant computer comprised of data centers, networks and devices on the fringe, but thats not good enough. With massive amounts of untapped data and cloud computers still running on desktop processors, there are opportunities to change the computing model. Doing so will bring a collection of immersive services to the worlds population while using less energy at the same time. Theres much work to be done before this future arrives, however.

Energy efficiency and cost is driving everything we do in cloud computing, saidPartha Ranganathan, distinguished technologist for HP. Speaking on a panel at the GigaOM Structure conference,Ranganathan pointed to the massive potential yet to be found in the cloud through low-powered devices. Todays cellphones have as much computing power as NASA had in the 1960s. They launched a rocket to the moon and were launching pigs and birds, he said, referring to the popular Angry Birds game.

Anant Agarwal, co-founder and CTO of Tilera Corporation agreed. Datacenters use hundreds of megawatts of power because theyre build upon desktop processors. We can do 100 times better with specific cloud processors that have many cores in a chip but dont have other features not needed for cloud computing. Agarwal suggested that processors are still the bottleneck in cloud services because bandwidth is plentiful and fast while memristors are providing cheaper, non-volatile memory. But theres still an issue of software, according toJason Hoffman, founder and chief scientist of Joyent.

Software is! a milli on times worse than it needs to be, Hoffman said, mainly because theres no software platform for the cloud itself. Agarwal suggests an OSaaS or Operating System as a Service to address this issue. Operating systems today are really good for a single computer, he said. Cloud apps require systems programmers, however, to deal with load balancing, databases and more. And as computing has come down in price, it has allowed software to be sloppy, said Agarwal.

What will overcoming of these challenges bring? The panelists used the example of how todays high-end luxury cars examine hundreds of data points to determine if the driver is falling asleep. Scaling such computation to the world as a giant computer will lead to new interactions with computers, services and even people. Instead of using the cloud for simple voice searches as we do today on smartphones, tomorrows cloud will be able to interpret our gestures, expressions and even our current health stats. That sounds great, but if it doesnt pan out, we can always use a cheap desktop with an sensor-filled Kinect.

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