Daily Archives: July 19, 2012

The Great New American Outsourcing, Clouds to China?

Fast forward to Olympics 2016.  Senator Reid is still the majority leader.  (It could happen.)  This time he’s not calling for the burning of our Olympic team’s Chinese-made uniforms as he recently did, but instead that we boycott watching the games on streaming video.  Why? Because, quelle horreur, in 2016 the gazillion gigabytes of Olympic video featuring our athletes are all stored in the Chinese Cloud.

It’s a future, just four years from now, when we could discover we’ve outsourced not just what remains of our 200-year-old textile industry, but the infrastructure of the 21st century’s information superhighway.

The Cloud is the fastest growing infrastructure on the planet.  Every sector of the world’s economy is migrating to it, from entertainment to medicine.  Accordingly to Cisco’s on-going forecasts, data traffic is growing at a torrid pace.  The numbers and prefixes are beyond easy comprehension: enter the zetabyte era?

Soon hourly traffic on the Internet will exceed annual traffic of a few years back. Data traffic is already bigger and growing far faster inside these warehouse-scale computers, where information is stored and first processed, than the data flow on the network.  Quite rationally, China has targeted outsourcing the West’s soaring appetite for Cloud services.

For the non-cognoscenti, data centers are stadium-scale buildings filled with tens of thousands of power-hungry computer chips and vast digital storage arrays. Inside, a data center resembles the set of a Ridley Scott science fiction movie, or perhaps the Borg ship from Star Trek.  But this is the real world.

China’s Cloud capabilities are being built out at four times the rate of growth of China’s own domestic Internet services.  In fact, China’s Cloud is being built out faster than data demand in the entire Asia-Pacific region.  Unlike many other products and services, the big market for data services is outside of Asia-Pacific. Ripe pickings for outsourcing.

Analysts at India-based Netscribes forecast China’s Cloud spending will rise from under $20 billion today to $150 billion a year before the next Olympics. With that kind of capability, the Cloud epicenter will move from where the Internet was born, just outside the Washington beltway, to Inner Mongolia.

Everyone that matters in the Cloud industry, including industry leaders IBM [NYSE:IBM] and HP [NYSE:HPQ], are doing big business building Cloud infrastructure projects across China.

Here’s one telegraphic bellwether. The world’s biggest single data center, the size of 20 football fields, is under construction in Chongqing and, coincidentally, will be completed in 2016, in time for the next summer Olympics.  The $1.6 billion Chongqing Data Center is triple the size of Apple’s newest monster center in North Carolina.  The Chongqing facility and thousands more nearly as large, form the heart of the expanding Cloud infrastructure.

And the Chongqing center by itself will need 200 megawatts of electric power – consuming the entire output of a city-class generating station.  Therein lies the clue to China’s advantage.  It’s not cheap labor.  The core advantage resides with another infrastructure build-out: China’s electric grid.

A data center’s electric demand can rival a steel mill.  In this case the demand for bits, unlike steel, is accelerating.  Just like steel-mills, data centers crave cheap power.  And more than steel mills, they especially crave reliable, predictable power.

Unknown outside of the cloistered specialists in the data-center world, we’ve quietly entered an era where the cost to powercomputing rivals will soon exceed the cost to buy the computing hardware itself. (For more on these power trends see Price Matters.) It’s no surprise then that a recent global survey by Datacenter Dynamics found that “Energy cost and availability is the #1 worry of data center operators.”

That’s why Apple and Facebook built their massive new data centers in North Carolina where the grid is 85 percent coal and nuclear — the anchors to predictable, long-run reliable and cheap power. That’s why China’s government, having built a spanking new electric grid as big as America’s has designated Cloud computing as a “Strategic Emerging Industry.”  Note too that China’s grid is 80 percent coal-fired.

source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/markpmills/2012/07/16/the-great-new-american-outsourcing-clouds-to-china/

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The cloud will move supercomputers into the mainstream

Cloud computing will move supercomputers out of the research labs and into mainstream businesses, it was claimed this week.

Dial-up supercomputing services are making it possible for smaller companies to analyse vast quantities of data, run engineering simulations, or design new drugs.

In an interview with Computer Weekly, Matt Wood, product manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said that supercomputers are losing their reputation as a niche technology as high-performance cloud services take off.

The company introduced its cluster computing supercomputing service, ranked at number 42 in the top 500 list of the world’s fastest computers, in the cloud last November.

“Supercomputing is only niche because in the traditionally provisioned world, it is difficult to get access to it, but once you make that access easy, then a real world of computing workloads opens up,” said Wood.

Superfast number-crunching

Pharmaceutical specialist Nimbus Discovery and simulation specialist Schrodinger has used a 50,000-core supercomputer on AWS to screen 21 million compounds for their effectiveness in designing a new drug.

The system, which had 59TB of memory – equivalent to 10 copies of the Wikipedia database – would have taken months and cost millions of dollars to create using traditional supercomputer technology.

But Schrodinger was able to complete the work – equivalent to 12.5 years of calculations using conventional computing power – in a few hours, at a cost of £4,900 an hour, with no upfront cost.

Spanish bank Bankinter is using Amazon Web Services to develop algorithms to assess the financial health of its clients. It was able to reduce processing time from 23 hours to 20 minutes by drawing on Amazon’s high-performance computing services.

Other organisations using Amazon’s on-demand supercomputing services include Unilever and Nasa, which is using the service to analyse images taken by its experimental Athlete space exploring robot

Reducing costs and speeding innovation

Wood said there is a huge untapped demand from researchers in industry and universities that need access to mid-range supercomputers – with between 100 and 2,500 processor cores – to run complex simulations.

The high cost of traditional supercomputers and long waiting times for processing slots is a significant barrier, he said.

Medicine is one area where on-demand supercomputing could make a significant difference, by helping scientists to tailor medicine to patients’ genetic make-up.

The first human genome took 13 years to sequence and cost tens of millions of dollars. Today, a genome can be sequenced in two days for less than $10,000. The cost is likely to fall to under $1,000.

“If you get enough computational resource you can start to mine that data. You can start designing treatment regimes to target a specific tumour cell, rather than healthy cells,” he said.

Big data getting bigger

And businesses will harness on-demand supercomputers for analysing growing volumes of big data, Wood predicted. Amazon has developed a cloud-based Hadoop service to help companies process large volumes of data.

“The explosion of data is going to be a big driver. Supercomputing in financial services, mining data, creating better financial models, is going to be very important,” he said.

Amazon sees no reason why supercomputers running at Exascale speeds – equivalent to a million trillion calculations a second – could not eventually be made available in the cloud.

“The number of use cases for that sort of level will grow. It’s a reasonable target,” said Wood, “but we are going to deploy it in a way that everyone can take advantage of it.”

source:http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240157970/The-cloud-will-move-supercomputers-into-the-mainstream

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