Lynne Kiesling
Last week I wrote about Microsoft’s Hohm energy management product announcement. Yesterday at earth2tech, Katie Fehrenbacher elaborated on the cloud computing angle, and how Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service might change energy data storage, computing, and business models. Microsoft, Google, and others are all exploring cloud computing, for good reason:
The trend of turning to cloud computing as a more efficient way to utilize computing power will only grow, too. At the Structure 2009 conference, held by our sister site GigaOM, the CEO of content delivery network company Akamai, Peter Sagan, said that cloud computing was a much more efficient and green way to do computing, a sentiment that was echoed by executives from web companies, telecom firms and Internet infrastructure makers.
What am I missing that makes cloud computing so attractive? I have an office computer that only gets used 30 hours a week, and two personal computers that soak up another 24 hours, max, so I have cheap compute cycles coming out my ears. If I need a big processing facility, I can buy a half-dozen El Cheapo PCs, load them up with Linux and Mathematica, and parallel process until the cows come home.
In the statistics business, we routinely get a late night inspiration and fire off an analysis or simulation that ties up some office or university processor for hours or days. We can do this because compute power is a cheap commodity, literally sitting idle on our desks. When some technocrat decides that Cloud Computing (TM) is More Efficient, I check my wallet, and hope the university IT folks see this as a gimmick to gather subscriptions–and YOUR DATA–for life.