Computing in the Clouds

Cloud Computing! The initial reactions of the paparazzi would be “wow! what a jazzy jargon” . Let me clear the air here , it is an old wine sold in a funky name. Cloud Computing has been there for years now , fondly called with different names through generation of conceptualizers; Distributed Computing,Parallel Computing,Web Computing all map to Cloud Computing.

What on earth (oops skies! ) were these people thinking while giving such a name to an age old concept? Well the logic that goes behind this is the project aimed at reusing the computing capabilities of n number of machines instead of creating a supercomputer. Such a project was launched in May 1999 by University of California for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence(SETI) popularly known as SETI@home. SETI@home initiated the use of unused clock cycles among millions of users across the world. Thus the work that a supercomputer situated in a room in Berkley could do , was distributed across the globe.This gave the desktop users a chance to donate some clock cycles for research purposes.(A charity cause for all those IT Employees who dont shut down, rather lock their desktops after office hours). So the search for ETI in the skies led to naming the project as SETI@home.

Many such projects joined the league like Folding@home,Rosetta@home aimed at finding the cure to life threatening diseases , by just causing users to donate some clock cycles.Einsten@home is an other project aimed at studying the gravitational waves from pulsars using FFT.FFT operation requires TeraFLOPS of processing power , hence the focus shifted again on “Cloud”.

SETI@home used SETI@home classic s/w initially for sharing the clock cycles, this was replaced by BOINC(Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing ) as the middleware platform providing platform independent services for all the volunteer computing systems like the ones mentioned above.

Many people perceive that Cloud Computing takes us back to the “Thin Client” era, similar to that Mainframes did decades back . Google and Microsoft have joined hands for the Blue Cloud project aimed at providing an enterprise Cloud infrastructure.

Team of Mr. Gates and Steve Balmer is not far away , Microsoft has also embraced the Web 2.0 initiative towards Cloud Computing. If ever “anti-desktop” initiators like Google and “desktop-loving” Microsoft join synergies to create a “Cloud Computing” Infrastructure , this would lead to “Hybrid Software Delivery Model“, which would be a breath of fresh air for the Web world.

But Cloud Computing is not with its share of bottlenecks. Considering Cloud Computing to be a reality and to actually process or fetch file from a remote machine in realtime would require the network and Internet Infrastructure to be fast and robust as ever. Cloud Computing focuses more on distributing the tasks to various machines so the process management should also be efficient. With the current monopoly of the ISP’s on the Internet world providing very low Quality Connectivity and speeds , with constant disruptions in web traffic; Cloud Computing to become a reality atleast in India will take time.

“Cloud Computing” initiatives and projects are majorly thriving on Universities and “research oriented” companies like Google/IBM.Its time that techies and IT giants join the league to create a cloud infrastructure.Cause the future is in the “Clouds”!!