{"id":1842,"date":"2012-05-30T13:26:26","date_gmt":"2012-05-30T13:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.journeytothecloud.com\/?p=1895"},"modified":"2012-05-30T13:26:26","modified_gmt":"2012-05-30T13:26:26","slug":"where-is-the-cloud-going-try-thinking-minority-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/where-is-the-cloud-going-try-thinking-minority-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Is the Cloud Going? Try Thinking \u201cMinority Report\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read a news release (here<\/a>) recently where NVidia is proposing to partition processing between on-device and cloud-located graphics hardware\u2026here\u2019s an excerpt: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cKepler cloud GPU technologies shifts cloud computing into a new gear,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA president and chief executive officer. “The GPU has become indispensable. It is central to the experience of gamers. It is vital to digital artists realizing their imagination. It is essential for touch devices to deliver silky smooth and beautiful graphics. And now, the cloud GPU will deliver amazing experiences to those who work remotely and gamers looking to play untethered from a PC or console.\u201d<\/p>\n

As well as the split processing that is handled by the Silk browser on the Kindle Fire (see here<\/a>), I started thinking about that \u201cprocessing partitioning\u201d strategy in relation to other aspects of computing and cloud computing in particular.\u00a0 My thinking is that, over the next five to seven years (at most by 2020), there will be several very important seismic shifts in computing dealing with at least four separate events:\u00a0 1) user data becomes a centralized commodity that\u2019s brokered by a few major players,\u00a0 2) a new cloud-specific programming language is developed, 3) processing becomes \u201ccompletely\u201d decoupled from hardware and location, and, D) end user computing becomes based almost completely on SoC technologies (see here<\/a>).\u00a0 The end result will be a world of data and processing independence never seen that will allow us to live in that Minority Report world.\u00a0 I\u2019ll describe the events and then will describe how all of them will come together to create what I call \u201cpervasive personal processing\u201d or P3<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

User Data<\/strong><\/p>\n

Data about you, your reading preferences, what you buy, what you watch on TV, where you shop, etc. exist in literally thousands of different locations and that\u2019s a problem\u2026not for you\u2026but for merchants and the companies that support them.\u00a0 It\u2019s information that must be stored and maintained and regularly refreshed for it to remain valuable, basically, what is being called \u201cbig data.\u201d\u00a0The extent of this data almost cannot be measured because it is so pervasive and relevant to everyday life. It is contained within so many services we access day in and day out and businesses are struggling to manage it. Now the argument goes that they do this, at great cost, because it is a competitive advantage to hoard that information (information is power, right?) and eventually, profits will arise from it.\u00a0 Um, maybe yes and maybe no but it\u2019s extremely difficult to actually measure that \u201ceventual\u201d profit\u2026so I\u2019ll go along with \u201cno.\u201d Now even though big data-focused hardware and software manufacturers are attempting to alleviate these problems of scale, the businesses who house these growing petabytes\u2026and yes, even exabytes\u2026of data are not seeing the expected benefits\u2014relevant to their profits\u2014as it costs money, lots of it.\u00a0 This is money that is taken off the top line and definitely affects the bottom line.<\/p>\n

Because of these imaginary profits (and the real loss), more and more companies will start outsourcing the \u201choarding\u201d of this data until the eventual state is that there are 2 or 3 big players who will act as brokers. I personally think it will be either the credit card companies or the credit rating agencies\u2026both groups have the basic frameworks for delivering consumer profiles as a service (CPaaS) and charge for access rights.\u00a0 A big step toward this will be when Microsoft unleashes IDaaS (Identity as a Service) as part of their integrating Active Directory into their Azure cloud. It\u2019ll be a hurdle for them to convince the public to trust them, but I think they will eventually prevail.<\/p>\n

These profile brokers will start using IDaaS because then they don\u2019t have to have separate internal identity management systems (for separate data repositories of user data) for other businesses to access their CPaaS offerings.\u00a0 Once this starts to gain traction you can bet that the real data mining begins on your online, and offline, habits because your loyalty card at the grocery store will be part of your profile\u2026as will your
\ncredit history and your public driving record and the books you get from your local library and\u2026well, you get the picture.\u00a0 Once your consumer profile is centralized, all kinds of data feeds will appear because the profile brokers will pay for them.\u00a0 Your local government, always strapped for cash, will sell you out in an instant for some recurring monthly revenue.<\/p>\n

Cloud-specific Programming<\/strong><\/p>\n

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and\/or to express algorithms precisely but, to-date, they have been entirely encapsulated within the local machine (or in some cases the nodes of a super computer or HPC cluster which, for our purposes, really is just a large single machine).\u00a0 What this means is that the programs written for those systems need to know precisely where the functions will be run, what subsystems will run them, the exact syntax and context, etc.\u00a0 One slight error or a small lag in the response time and the whole thing could crash or, at best, run slowly or produce additional errors.<\/p>\n

But, what if you had a computer language that understood the cloud and took into account latency, data errors and even missing data?\u00a0 A language that was able to partition processing amongst all kinds of different processing locations, and know that the next time, the locations may have moved?\u00a0 A language that could guess at the best place to process (i.e. lowest latency, highest cache hit rate, etc.) but then change its mind as conditions change?<\/p>\n

That language would allow you to specify a type of processing and then actively seek the best place for that processing to happen based on many different details\u2026processing intensity, floating point, entire algorithm or proportional, subset or superset\u2026and fully understand that, in some cases, it will have to make educated guesses about what the returned data will be (in case of unexpected latency).\u00a0 It will also have to know that the data to be processed may exist in a thousand different locations such as the CPaaS providers, government feeds, or other providers for specific data types. \u00a0It will also be able to adapt its processing to the available processing locations such that it elegantly deprecates functionality…maybe based on a probability factor included in the language that records variables over time and uses that to guess where it will be next and line up the processing needed beforehand.\u00a0 The possibilities are endless, but not impossible\u2026which leads to\u2026<\/p>\n

Decoupled Processing and SoC<\/strong><\/p>\n

As can be seen by the efforts NVidia is making is this area, it will soon be that the processing of data will become completely decoupled from where that data lives or is used. What this is and how it will be done will rely on other events (see previous section) but the bottom line is that once it is decoupled, a whole new class of device will appear, in both static and mobile versions, that will be based on System on a Chip (SoC) which will allow deep processing density with very, very low power consumption. These devices will support multiple code sets across hundreds of cores and be able to intelligently communicate their capabilities in real time to distributed processing services that request their local processing services\u2026whether over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IrDA, GSM, CDMA, or whatever comes next, the devices themselves will make the choice based on best use of bandwidth, processing request, location, etc. \u00a0These devices will take full advantage of the cloud specific computing languages to distribute processing across dozens and possibly hundreds of processing locations and will hold almost no data because they don\u2019t have to, everything exists someplace else in the cloud.\u00a0 In some cases these devices will be very small, the size of a thin watch for example, but they will be able to process the equivalent of what a super computer can do because they don\u2019t do all of the processing, only what makes sense for the location and capabilities, etc.<\/p>\n

These decoupled processing units, Pervasive Personal Processing or P3 units, will allow you to walk up to any workstation or monitor or TV set\u2026anywhere in the world\u2026and basically conduct your business as if you were sitting in from of your home computer.\u00a0 All of you data, your photos, your documents, and your personal files will be instantly available in whatever way that you prefer.\u00a0 All of your history for whatever services you use, online and offline, will be directly accessible.\u00a0 The memo you left off writing that morning in the Houston office will be right where you left it, on that screen you just walked up to in the hotel lobby in Tokyo the next day, with the cursor blinking in the middle of the word you stopped on.<\/p>\n

Welcome to Minority Report.<\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read a news release (here) recently where NVidia is proposing to partition processing between on-device and cloud-located graphics hardware\u2026here\u2019s an excerpt: \u201cKepler cloud GPU technologies shifts cloud computing into a new gear,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA president and chief executive officer. “The GPU has become indispensable. It is central to the experience of gamers.…Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-1842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud-computing","tag-cloud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}