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As Yahoo! Research Chief Prabhakar Raghavan recently told Businessweek, “In a sense, there are only five computers on Earth.” These computers, vast data centers which have come to be called “clouds”, belong to Google, Yahoo!, IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft. Nearly all of our online activities, from sifting through CNN.com’s news stories to searching for risotto recipes to updating our family’s blog, are facilitated by a vast network of computers owned by one of these companies. These clouds are able to process huge amounts of data at amazing speeds, and many industry experts point to them as the wave of the future. The five big clouds are now opening up to smaller businesses, allowing them to compete in the world of data-intensive computing.

Clouds are essentially networks made up of a myriad of smaller machines, inexpensive servers, which can store and move huge amounts of data. These next-generation supercomputers are what allow Google to achieve their goal, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Most of these cloud clusters are not on a company’s central campus, but in various locations around the world. And when one machine dies or outlives its usefulness, it is replaced and the service goes on uninterrupted. Businessweek likens the trend toward cloud computing to a shift in how American’s receive electricity: “At the most basic level, it’s the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities.”

Now, smaller businesses will have the option of shutting down their small “generators”, expensive, clunky, and inefficient servers which cannot compare to power of clouds like Google’s or Amazon’s. As Talkibie reported in January, Amazon’s Web Services Division is reaching out to businesses who would essentially “rent” a piece of the cloud. Applications, websites, data, and even documents could be hosted on Amazon’s cloud, allowing smaller companies to launch products without the risk or investment of their own data centers.

Yahoo! has also taken an active role in expanding cloud computing beyond the borders of Silicon Valley. They’ve pioneered an open source project called Hadoop, which mimics some of the functions of Google’s groundbreaking software MapReduce. MapReduce essentially breaks down every computing task into thousands of smaller tasks which can be completed by individual machines within the cloud, then reassembles the information gathered into an answer. Yahoo! is working to make this software available on other computing clusters through Hadoop. Ironically, Google is now using Hadoop for some its community projects (MapReduce is too secret). Yahoo!, like Google, is making some of its computing power available to universities for scientific research and teaching.

IBM has also made gestures to open its cloud to business customers. In addition to hosting web applications for small and medium-sized businesses, they have collaborated with Google to build a prototype cloud for use by large universities. Fitted-out with Hadoop and IBM’s business applications, the joint Google/IBM university cloud will help computer scientists further develop the cloud computing of the next generation. Microsoft also sees the application of clouds to scientific study and higher learning. As Businessweek reports, Tony Hey, Microsoft’s vice-president for external research predicts that clouds will, “function as huge virtual laboratories, with a new generation of librarians - some of them human - “curating” troves of data, opening them to researchers with the right credentials.”

This trend towards open clouds will not only help small businesses, scientists, and students, but it will also change the landscape of the internet. It will likely increase its size and scope dramatically, and allow us to connect across boundaries in record speed. These five companies are essentially setting themselves up as the world’s computer, with the internet as their operating system. They are providing top universities with the latest research into computing, not the other way around. Though it’s too early to tell whether the trend toward large-scale clouds will benefit the average user, it is certain to change the way we interact with each other through technology.

Friday, February 29th, 2008 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

By Haley January Eckels