Friday, April 4th 2008
Hyatt Regency Orange County
Cloud Computing
I recently had the opportunity to attend an engaging presentation on technology trends in the future presented Professor Ken Baldauf, Florida State University. Cloud Computing isn’t a programming geek who has his head in the sky, but rather computing that shares resources. Technology giants like Amazon, IBM, Yahoo!, and Google are offering customers supercomputing capability that has traditionally only been available to the military, government intelligence agencies, universities, or research labs that need the capability to perform complex computations for simulations of climate change, predicting earthquakes, analyzing risk in financial portfolios, medical information, or even immersive computer games.
A recent article in Business Week reports that Google’s search engine and productivity applications are among the early products of efforts to locate processing power on vast banks of computer servers, rather than on desktop PCs. Microsoft has released online software called Windows Live for photo-sharing, file storage, and other applications served from new data centers. Yahoo has taken similar steps. IBM has devoted 200 researchers to its cloud computing project. And Amazon.com recently broadened access for software developers to its “Elastic Compute Cloud” service, which lets small software companies pay for processing power streamed from Amazon’s data centers.
At first glance one might think that Cloud Computing is limited to a rather small group of power uses, but actually Cloud Computing’s potential is widespread and offers super computing capability to the masses.
While Cloud Computing still faces many challenges such as making all of the various systems and software work together it certainly has the potential of being the next wave in computer technology.
Sally Kurz
Professor Business Computing
Coastline Community College