Matthias

I was wondering if you accept guest post for your blog. If you do, I would like to submit a few. You can see a sample of my work at LaptopComputers.org under the author James Mowery. I’ve also written for several high-profile blogs like Mashable, Perfromancing, and CMSWire. Thank you for your time.

- James

no… We do not post the slides here, they are put up at the linked page, as stated in the article. And, the lecture is in german, as printed in the “Studienverzeichnis”, so, no english slides…

Matthias

Read: http://blog.drtritsch.com/?p=98

Benny discusses VDI and its applicability to enterprises and desktops (yes, there’s a difference!).

Matthias

it seems, you only follow Cloud People. Try, for example:

http://twitter.com/douglasabrown/status/11404352185

Or: http://twitter.com/brianmadden, http://twitter.com/crod, http://twitter.com/rspruijt or http://twitter.com/drtritsch

Those are the VDI type of people…

But, you’re right:

http://twitter.com/thinguy/status/11315541279

And: I’m writing this at my Sun Ray @ Home, the computing takes part in the Office on a central server, and I assume, looking at ThinGuy’s tweet above, those will even get way more centralized in the future. Cool, good! Let’s go that route. My Sun Ray only consumes 4W, plus a monitor. Silent, quiet, cheap! My PC is only switched on, when I need flashy flash stuff, as that doesn’t work to well across WANs, where display and compute are separated. Speed of light and latency are the problems here… And, as you can see, my “bit-hoarding” is done on a cheap Intel Atom system using between 40 and 65W (read my blog), so in total my power consumption is small for the computing I need to do…

OK, after a bit of twitter-mania (and Sun glorification), back to arguments:

Yes, I also do believe that client-side computing will be reduced, BUT, as we can see, also Citrix and VMware have created Apps for the iPad. So, there still is the chance of “fully loaded stacks” on “Client-Side-Virtualisation”, or “Server-Side-Virtualisation”. For decades we’ve seen the swing between client-server and big-client and client-server and big-client and client-server… So, why shall we assume, that the current trend towards big DCs with “clouds” is the end of all of that? And with the exchangeability of the “images” it may very well go back to client-side computing. We could all ask the simple question: “Why, in order to write an email, or a document, do I need to flood the air with network traffic? I can do that locally on my iPhone, no need to be “online”. We’ll see, which of these will be out there, but I assume, we’ll see a big mix. Yes, there are rumors, that, once again, Oracle might offer an “Office in the Cloud” solution, something, that Sun did shortly after it bought StarOffice. Sadly, in those old days, that offer hadn’t been very successful, let’s see, if the times have changed… Also, there are rumors that VDI appliances might come out (see, for example, thinguy’s tweet above), so, yes, centralization of certain things might happen, and, yes, they can be called a “cloud” or “happen somewhere in the cloud”, no doubt about that. Yes, that’s driven by economy of scale, no doubt about that either!

But I guess, you didn’t completely understand my point w.r.t. multithreading, but, finally, it might not be a big point after all, with Moore’s Law still active: I’m talking about the ability of “spreading” the load of a SINGLE system over multiple threads. I’m not talking about “distributed systems” per se (that’s been called Grid computing in the old days!), I’m talking about massive DBs, that perform parallel tasks and need massive memeory and CPU in order to perform their jobs (Oracle RAC, Hadoop, you-name-it). These things aren’t easy to program, but you might be right, there aren’t that many such apps. Most can be segmented on higher levels (applets talking to each other), and therefore that argument might be moot… Especially with the fact, that Moore’s law will sooner or later provide more CPU cycles. than the app needs, so thinking and programming multi-threaded might not be needed any longer. It’s only been a kludge to circumvent the problems that came from the fact, that systems hadn’t been powerful enough…

Overall I agree with your last paragraph!

Still, I’m not as sure as you are, that that will be the overall future. I assume, we will also see “photorealistic image editing” directly on the phone, docs- and email-writing directly on the phone, speech recognition on the phone (although we also see many of these things with Google trying to put those into the cloud, and remove them from the actual device), I assume, we need one powerful and long network outage to see the benefits of “local compute power”… And with the “provisioning” features of the “cloud”, these can also easily be provisioned to the device itself.

So, thanks for the comments, I agree in many parts, but don’t see the future as “cloud only”…

Matthias

On the server side there are many reasons for centralising systems, most notably the massive economies of scale that stem from serving hundreds of millions of users rather than just one. Fortunately the problems you talk about re: multi-threading etc. only need to be solved once and the results are available for everyone – you don’t need to run your own BigTable clusters to benefit from the service via AppEngine for example.

The way I see it there will be a single, loosely coupled computer (“The Cloud™”) powered by a small handful of very large providers (Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) and a myriad smaller ones (Joyent et al). There will also be “community” clouds operated by companies like IBM on behalf of large enterprise, but as these will be able to communicate with others they can be considered part of the overall system too. The days of people running their own services are numbered.

Sam

I want to RE-INSTALL, that’s the main reason. My network card, for example, now is “rge1″, as “rge0″ is still occupied by the no-longer existing entry for the old board, and there are some other things this way…

So, I want a CLEAN NEW install natively on this board, not a “carried-over” install from a different hardware.

And, for that, I wait for a stable basis to start a-new…

That’s all. The “old” install has been upgraded already using BEs, so, yes, I know, and yes, I do, and use those… And will also use going forward…

Matthias

I’m not as optimistic as you are w.r.t. “neglectance” of the underlying HW and OS “segments”. We all know, that even building large SMP systems was and still is a very difficult task (Sun was very successful with that, both in HW and scalability of the OS across multiple CPUs/Cores), and you need an OS that helps with that. If you even add more distance (different chassis’), you hit the problem of speed of light. All known, partially solved, still not used in mainstream.

Main inhibitor I see, is, that from the APP-DEV side, creating APPs that really use the advantages of multi-threads, or multi-CPU is still an art. It even becomes more difficult, as with the advent of Java, the dev’s thinking was shrinking to “applets”, and no longer to “big complex systems”. OK, that shift also helped in “network communication” between the applets (needed, because single systems hadn’t been powerful enough), but it still hits the “speed of light” problem.

And, with the advent of big multi-core commodity CPUs (think: Intel Nehalem) being able to speak to one’s another directly (big advantage of the Nehalem BUS system here!) my guess is, that we will still see big single OS systems and less “distributed” apps… This is also driven by the fact mentioned in my article, that the CPU-needs of software didn’t keep up with Moore’s law.

Yes, you’re right, that Google, or Facebook or Twitter are more “cloudy” than systems using virtualization as a layer underneath it (like Amazon EC2). BUT: Those are only three, although well known and prominent, examples of cloud computing.

So, the main point here is: Who will be those, building apps to be run in the cloud, and where do they come from?

Same, as we see, that Linux doesn’t scale well in SMP beyond a certain amount of cores (developers don’t have that much money to run and test big machines!), we might also see dev’s coming from the desktop and expanding their experiences “to the cloud”, using stuff like amazon EC2 and even possibly “desktop hypervisors” as their model of development (see my “VDI future” article (Link in the above article)), which might make a lot of sense for “smaller” apps.

We yet do not know, if the future of computing will again take place in big, centralized DCs, or on small handheld, but powerful, and always on devices. That’s a bet on the future, and I’m not willing to bet here, at least not right now…

Matthias