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The Magic of the "Cloud": Supercomputers for Everybody, Everywhere

ERIC BREWER, UC - Berkeley Slides - 2.9 MB Download - 227 MB Watch the Talk (17:36)

The personal computer and the Internet have had a large impact on computing research. The personal computer was built originally to run applications such as office tools (document preparation systems, spreadsheets, inventories, etc.). The combination of the personal computer and the Internet enabled email. The web browser, invented at the University of Illinois, was another early application made possible by the Internet.

The personal computer has now been transformed into an access device. Email is one of many applications that have moved from the personal computer into the Cloud - a collection of services provided by computing resources distributed across the Internet. This technological shift has sparked a vast amount of innovation. The browser has become a Universal Client - the primary interface to many new applications. Many more applications will be made possible by Cloud-enabling the high performance databases and high performance computing research from the last 30 years.

The potential impact of the Cloud, both financial and human, is huge. The Cloud today has 1.6B users, which is more people than are in the developed world. The opportunities have been greatly enhanced by the emergence of wireless access to the Internet, another example of long term research being embodied into current devices. The human interface to the Cloud has become not only the personal computer, but many other devices such as cell phones and sensor-based GPS navigation systems.

Of course, the iPhone and its sister smartphones is really a personal computer in your pocket. It's an access device. Many aspects of the IPhone, including the operating system, sensors, multipoint interfaces came from long-term basic research. New families of Cloud applications, sometimes called "groupware", are collective. Unlike the personal computer, the Cloud isn't personal. There are opportunities that have been created by the Cloud for group communication and social networking and for multi-user games. Recent examples include Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and an abundance of collective recommendations and reviews.

Conceptually, the Cloud works like a personal computer, in the sense that computing is at the center of the network. But instead of having a small number of very big computers (servers), in order to support more users and larger applications, the Cloud is built of a lot of smaller computers (nodes) combined by using "cluster computing". The advantage of this approach is that if more computing is needed, more nodes can be added. Also if individual systems fail, computation can move to another machine.

Rather than having clusters built directly as multi-processor-machines, they can be built on virtual machines constructed from collections of computers and software from across the Internet. The infrastructure can respond dynamically to shifts in usage and usage patterns. If there is an onslaught of search or other usage the system is "elastic" and can be expanded automatically to meet the need. Any application can now scale to a million or even a billion users.

Of course the nodes have to reside somewhere. Today Clouds are often built from containers which contain thousands of computers. Microsoft is building a data center in Chicago which is really a "parking lot" full of computing containers. That is one way to get scalability.

This new model of computing is not without its research challenges. A new approach to distributing and maintaining software is needed. Using the Cloud it should be possible to experiment with new software with subsets of users on small virtual machines, and then scale up as stability of the software improves and the usage grows. Cost becomes scalable as well - more capacity can be rented as needed on an hour by hour basis.

Energy is both a challenge and an opportunity. The Cloud already uses .5% of the global carbon footprint. Electricity is largest cost of the present-day Cloud but it becomes an easier problem to attack because machines can be placed near energy sources and low-power components can be introduced easily as the technology improves.

Another challenge is security and privacy. Since the Cloud stores all the data, deep analysis and correlation is possible, but left unchecked this is potentially a risk as well as a good thing. How do we detect and prevent leaks? How do we enforce deletion? What rights does the individual have?

The Cloud has the potential to change much about our lives - healthcare, education, science and productivity. A historic shift is in progress and the United States has a leadership role.