Cloud Computing: What Computing Will Become

Lets say that you need to run a program on your computer. With your typical computer, it would take a fair amount of time to run it, depending on the size of your program. Therefore, the bigger the program, the longer it will take to process. Now, what if you run that same program, not on one computer, but divide its processing work to 1 million other computers. Hence, the computers will each simultaneously run a tiny packet of one one millionth (1/1.000.000) of the necessary work and send the processed program to the user in 1/1.000.000 of the time. This is called cloud computing, and this is what computing will become.

The name cloud comes by because of the infinite amount of data that can be processed on these computers. The computers themselves are your typical home computers but hooked up in some way with other computers. Millions of them. This is the “secret” that google uses in its search engine. Try to make a query (a search request) on google. For this example, I used the word “me”. It turned out Three Billion Four Hundred and Ten Million(3.410.000.000) search results. all of this in the space of 0.21 seconds (results may vary depending on the time you made the query). How do they do it?

First of all, there is the hardware. They use their cloud computers, which are pockets of refrigerated buildings containing millions of computers at one place, distributed across the globe. Then there is the software. Google uses a well guarded software called Mapreduce. This software essentially divides the work needed to do a single process into millions of tiny packets of data and spreads them across the cloud computers. In a sense, its like teamwork. The results are then sent backe to the user almost instantly. In my search example above, if you used one computer to do the search, it will roughly take millions of times longer.

Once only a toy that can be played around by big computer companies, these clouds are currently finding their way to the general population. Amazon has launched a project which lets people tap their resource of clouds in exchange for a little fee. Google has launched a college class called Google 101 in major American Universities (first in Washington University). This class encourages students and programmers alike to dream up of big ideas for computer programs that could be made if you had the resource of millions of computers to process it. A far cry from our everyday programs that rely on the computing power of a single computer. This will result in a huge shift in computing. There will be bigger, better and faster programs to run.

It is said that when this new age comes, it would make the web look like a tiny atom. That we will be looking back at the web and laugh at how small it was. If Google could make tons of money from this “small” web, imagine what opportunities that cloud computers will offer to willing entrepreneurs.

There is certainly an uncertainty that cloud computers would be the mainstream. But something like this has actually happened on the early 1900s. Back in the day, oil was just “invented”. Everyone used it to light up their generators at home. Thats right, every house that had electricity had its own generator. Then came the invention of power plants, where electricity was made in huge volumes and then distributed to houses and factories via cables. Since then, instead of “making” electricity, people started buying it. Bye Bye generators.

The intelligent person would now begin to think what this would mean to everyday life. A flood of change is on the way. And as we all know, a flood of change brings with it a flood of opportunity. Grab it.

*For more information, check out www.businessweek.com , and the book, Wikinomics by Don Tapscott