Re: [FRIAM] Cloud computing
idle_speculation I don't think the cloud technology is ultimately intended for the end users who are using it now. The disillusionment a few on the list are expressing likely results from that. I am definitely not in the know from am industry perspective, but from a consumer perspective I always thought the major draw of cloud computing was ridiculously cheap, light, portable, full service computers. I have an hunch we are not to far away from touch-screen tablet computers the size of a kindle that will make young people wonder why anyone ever had a desktop. You only need a big swath of ram, a fast wireless connection, and a cloud. Portable devices do a lot of stuff nowadays, and if you are tech savvy you can do a lot remotely, but the cloud stuff has the possibility of making such things seamless for the non-savvy. After all, why would you ever want more than just the programs and files you are using at this moment on your computer? Why buy Acrobat when you can rent it for one cent a minute? Better yet, sign up for a service (like the ones currently being used for music access) and just get unlimited access to several hundred-thousand commercial programs for a low monthly fee. Because it downloads each feature as you start to use it, there isn't even a lag at start-up time. Hell, you can give the computers away for free with a two-year subscription, and it might even double as a cell phone. That ultimately might not do much for industrial application, but if the servers got reliable, and were managed by trusted companies well... that's a big commercial market. The technology isn't quite there yet, but these companies are setting themselves up in anticipation. /idle_speculation Eric On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 12:16 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: On Oct 17, 2009, at 4:51 PM, russell standish wrote: The whole cloud thing as presented in this article leaves me a bit cold. Few of the articles are written by folks using cloud computing, thus its just buzzword compliant hype. There really are some interesting cloud things happening, but I haven't seen a good article yet on it. After using Amazon, its clearly just hardware in the sky and not all that exciting. Mainly useful for moving your IT infrastructure outside of your buildings. But GAE (Google App Engine) has serious interest. First of all, it has a much easier way to build web apps. It does NOT give you LAMP -- but it does give you an interesting replacement which makes building web apps much simpler. And further, it integrates all the Google Desk Top apps and other services and libraries (Maps, Earth, Analytics and so on) into the GAE engine. The Google File System with Big Tables is pretty wonderful too. World wide secure transactions with a fragmented, replicated, file system. A third interesting cloud environment is Aptana, more programmer oriented and comes with an Eclipse plugin/front end. Unfortunately, very few articles capture the cloud scene. I don't want software as a service, I want it as an application, running on my own computer with my own data. Well, clearly cloud computing is not oriented toward desktop/personal computer applications. So sure, you wouldn't want cloud computing for your situation. With open source, I can get the applications at the price I can afford, and adapt them if needed for my needs. Agreed .. but again, the target is not you. Its folks who want to shoot their computers and servers and migrate away from the gawd awful problems of maintaining their own IT infrastructure. Don't forget: one of the biggest problems companies is how noob their employees are. The discipline of cloud computing is compelling for companies not wanting their spreadsheets walking around in laptops that travel world wide. If I need serious grunt, then no cloud will solve the supercomputing problem - regular high performance computing centres are still needed for that (although if the Grid is ever delivered not still-born, that is an alternative). The best we've got so far in this area is cloud (web) render farms, very popular and inexpensive for Blender users. I can see some point in enterprise-wide clouds though... Yup. Actually, if I were building a small business today, I'd go cloud, via the for-pay Google system. I'd fire anyone having a company spreadsheet or document on their laptop and not in the cloud. Or company email on their computer (POP rather than IMAP). It is just too expensive and dangerous. I was chief scientist for Sun's IT department for a couple of years and the things civilians do would blow your mind! -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud computing
Owen Densmore wrote: I'd fire anyone having a company spreadsheet or document on their laptop and not in the cloud. Or company email on their computer (POP rather than IMAP). It is just too expensive and dangerous. LANL, for example, mandates full disk encryption on hard drives. Hard drives are cheap. I'd much rather put up with this than not to be able study a paper that was stranded on an IMAP server. But IMAP or POP is not the issue, the issue is connected vs. disconnected. Wireless is not everywhere and where it is available, it is not reliably high bandwidth and low latency. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud computing
Lack of wireless is Nature's way of telling me I should stop staring at my computer and go interact with other people and my environment. -- R On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Marcus Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.comwrote: Owen Densmore wrote: I'd fire anyone having a company spreadsheet or document on their laptop and not in the cloud. Or company email on their computer (POP rather than IMAP). It is just too expensive and dangerous. LANL, for example, mandates full disk encryption on hard drives. Hard drives are cheap. I'd much rather put up with this than not to be able study a paper that was stranded on an IMAP server. But IMAP or POP is not the issue, the issue is connected vs. disconnected. Wireless is not everywhere and where it is available, it is not reliably high bandwidth and low latency. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud computing
Clouds are aimed at enterprise computing. As an example, a project I worked on recently was almost cancelled because the time and cost to purchase, install, and switch on the hardware exceeded the time and cost to code the software (3 months for a team of 5). Software development has become much more efficient than it was several years agothe main pain-points now are in the infrastructure. CIOs now want to shoot the people that run their hardware...and getting rid of the hardware is the next step. This is possibly not very palatable to many IT employees, which is why I think the cloud story as writ doesn't seem compelling...they finesse the *real* business valuea lot of out-of-work sysadmins. Regards, Saul 2009/10/19 ERIC P. CHARLES e...@psu.edu idle_speculation I don't think the cloud technology is ultimately intended for the end users who are using it now. The disillusionment a few on the list are expressing likely results from that. I am definitely not in the know from am industry perspective, but from a consumer perspective I always thought the major draw of cloud computing was ridiculously cheap, light, portable, full service computers. I have an hunch we are not to far away from touch-screen tablet computers the size of a kindle that will make young people wonder why anyone ever had a desktop. You only need a big swath of ram, a fast wireless connection, and a cloud. Portable devices do a lot of stuff nowadays, and if you are tech savvy you can do a lot remotely, but the cloud stuff has the possibility of making such things seamless for the non-savvy. After all, why would you ever want more than just the programs and files you are using at this moment on your computer? Why buy Acrobat when you can rent it for one cent a minute? Better yet, sign up for a service (like the ones currently being used for music access) and just get unlimited access to several hundred-thousand commercial programs for a low monthly fee. Because it downloads each feature as you start to use it, there isn't even a lag at start-up time. Hell, you can give the computers away for free with a two-year subscription, and it might even double as a cell phone. That ultimately might not do much for industrial application, but if the servers got reliable, and were managed by trusted companies well... that's a big commercial market. The technology isn't quite there yet, but these companies are setting themselves up in anticipation. /idle_speculation Eric On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 12:16 AM, *Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net*wrote: On Oct 17, 2009, at 4:51 PM, russell standish wrote: The whole cloud thing as presented in this article leaves me a bit cold. Few of the articles are written by folks using cloud computing, thus its just buzzword compliant hype. There really are some interesting cloud things happening, but I haven't seen a good article yet on it. After using Amazon, its clearly just hardware in the sky and not all that exciting. Mainly useful for moving your IT infrastructure outside of your buildings. But GAE (Google App Engine) has serious interest. First of all, it has a much easier way to build web apps. It does NOT give you LAMP -- but it does give you an interesting replacement which makes building web apps much simpler. And further, it integrates all the Google Desk Top apps and other services and libraries (Maps, Earth, Analytics and so on) into the GAE engine. The Google File System with Big Tables is pretty wonderful too. World wide secure transactions with a fragmented, replicated, file system. A third interesting cloud environment is Aptana, more programmer oriented and comes with an Eclipse plugin/front end. Unfortunately, very few articles capture the cloud scene. I don't want software as a service, I want it as an application, running on my own computer with my own data. Well, clearly cloud computing is not oriented toward desktop/personal computer applications. So sure, you wouldn't want cloud computing for your situation. With open source, I can get the applications at the price I can afford, and adapt them if needed for my needs. Agreed .. but again, the target is not you. Its folks who want to shoot their computers and servers and migrate away from the gawd awful problems of maintaining their own IT infrastructure. Don't forget: one of the biggest problems companies is how noob their employees are. The discipline of cloud computing is compelling for companies not wanting their spreadsheets walking around in laptops that travel world wide. If I need serious grunt, then no cloud will solve the supercomputing problem - regular high performance computing centres are still needed for that (although if the Grid is ever delivered not still-born, that is an alternative). The best we've got so far in this area is cloud (web) render farms, very popular and inexpensive for Blender users. I can see
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud computing (russell standish)
This is my first intevention in this list; I enjoy very much reading it (I was at the Santa Fe Complex in July, hi Stephen ...). My point of view is that what we need is also a good grid services: I've now a model which requires two hours to run on a standard quite fast pc; for each experiment I need to run it upon 18 different sets of parameters and our local voluntary grid ( http://ramses.di.unipmn.it:8080/status/WebStatusServlet ) solves very well the problem. Best, Pietro Terna -- The world is full of interesting problems to be solved! Home page http://web.econ.unito.it/terna FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud computing (russell standish)
Hi Pietro! Nice to see you on our list. We met in Italy at U. of Bologna a few years back. Welcome! -- Owen On Oct 18, 2009, at 1:19 PM, Pietro Terna wrote: This is my first intevention in this list; I enjoy very much reading it (I was at the Santa Fe Complex in July, hi Stephen ...). My point of view is that what we need is also a good grid services: I've now a model which requires two hours to run on a standard quite fast pc; for each experiment I need to run it upon 18 different sets of parameters and our local voluntary grid ( http://ramses.di.unipmn.it:8080/status/WebStatusServlet ) solves very well the problem. Best, Pietro Terna -- The world is full of interesting problems to be solved! Home page http://web.econ.unito.it/terna FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud computing
On Oct 17, 2009, at 4:51 PM, russell standish wrote: The whole cloud thing as presented in this article leaves me a bit cold. Few of the articles are written by folks using cloud computing, thus its just buzzword compliant hype. There really are some interesting cloud things happening, but I haven't seen a good article yet on it. After using Amazon, its clearly just hardware in the sky and not all that exciting. Mainly useful for moving your IT infrastructure outside of your buildings. But GAE (Google App Engine) has serious interest. First of all, it has a much easier way to build web apps. It does NOT give you LAMP -- but it does give you an interesting replacement which makes building web apps much simpler. And further, it integrates all the Google Desk Top apps and other services and libraries (Maps, Earth, Analytics and so on) into the GAE engine. The Google File System with Big Tables is pretty wonderful too. World wide secure transactions with a fragmented, replicated, file system. A third interesting cloud environment is Aptana, more programmer oriented and comes with an Eclipse plugin/front end. Unfortunately, very few articles capture the cloud scene. I don't want software as a service, I want it as an application, running on my own computer with my own data. Well, clearly cloud computing is not oriented toward desktop/personal computer applications. So sure, you wouldn't want cloud computing for your situation. With open source, I can get the applications at the price I can afford, and adapt them if needed for my needs. Agreed .. but again, the target is not you. Its folks who want to shoot their computers and servers and migrate away from the gawd awful problems of maintaining their own IT infrastructure. Don't forget: one of the biggest problems companies is how noob their employees are. The discipline of cloud computing is compelling for companies not wanting their spreadsheets walking around in laptops that travel world wide. If I need serious grunt, then no cloud will solve the supercomputing problem - regular high performance computing centres are still needed for that (although if the Grid is ever delivered not still-born, that is an alternative). The best we've got so far in this area is cloud (web) render farms, very popular and inexpensive for Blender users. I can see some point in enterprise-wide clouds though... Yup. Actually, if I were building a small business today, I'd go cloud, via the for-pay Google system. I'd fire anyone having a company spreadsheet or document on their laptop and not in the cloud. Or company email on their computer (POP rather than IMAP). It is just too expensive and dangerous. I was chief scientist for Sun's IT department for a couple of years and the things civilians do would blow your mind! -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud Computing?
Thus spake Owen Densmore circa 10/19/2008 06:09 PM: So I was wondering whether or not any other Friamers are using a cloud computing system? Be nice to share experiences. As our cluster ages, we're considering using EC2 instead. Particularly, we'd probably start with an image like: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?categoryID=101externalID=705 We'd have to add objective-c and a few other tools to the image, though. I haven't built up the steam to do the work, yet especially since our cluster is now receiving more care and attention. If any of you have done this, I'd appreciate any pointers to make the work easier. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
