The Cloud

When I was a kid, clouds were occasionally fluffy things in the sky, that more often then not – being in Ireland – rained down an incredible amount of dirty water on our heads.

As a teenager, Cloud was some sort of homo-erotic character from Final Fantasy games. Games I never, ever played and as such, understood.

Today, as a twenty-something IT “person”, a cloud is a broad term for how computing will go in future. Or, how it will go if ISPs push forward with better broadband services!

The point of cloud computing is to offer massive numbers of resources to do processing over a network. So, instead of rendering something on a local machine, for example, an artist can use the power of several computers around the world to create one big super-computer.

In millions of homes around the world people have donated CPU cycles to the Stanford University project to conduct protein folding using normally-idle computers around the globe. The project, called folding@home, picked up major pace when Sony included it as a default “screen saver” idea on every single Playstation 3 shipped. This project helps major scientific research into disease and other such developments. This research could continue without our humble game consoles, but is advanced much quicker with a giant “cloud” of worldwide computers to process the complex algorithms needed to understand protein folding.

More commonly clouds are being used as remote storage devices to unify our various machines. Apple released a product called mobileMe which not only has push-based IMAP email, but also has an online storage “locker” that appears on your computers drive as another hard disk. It can also store calendar events and the like in a virtual space, so when you’re logged into your PC at home, iMac at work or Macbook on a train, as long as they’re connected to the internet, and thus the “cloud”, your information remains synced up.

Ideally, broadband speeds would increase at a rate that allows us to back up entire hard drives to online spaces, so every computer we ever go on are the same. In future, we could envisage home computers not even having basic processing functionality – instead relying on a huge worldwide grid to do the work for us, at much faster rates.

Already a service called onLive has come out and is currently in early testing stages, which uses current broadband systems to distribute video games. Rather then just download and install games, though, you play games locally on a device that does nothing but stream data. Instead, all of the computational grunt is done remotely on huge servers. So, the server renders the graphics and does the hard work while all your set-top box does is download the data and display it on your TV in real-time.

Google has long been at the forefront of more simple cloud computing methods. Google docs, gmail and so on all use an online “cloud” to store information, so wherever you are, login with your details and all of your “stuff” is the same. Your YouTube subscriptions will be the same, the emails you checked yesterday will still be checked, etc.

The danger here, though, is with all of this information stored in a cloud – nothing is in your control. What happens if we store everything on a cloud. Our lives depend on remote processing to do daily computing tasks, play video games and store all of our documents… but then, for some reason or another, the cloud collapses. All of your data – gone.

Doomsday scenario, of course, but looking at the line of idiots who queued up for a BBC show about faulty PS3s who had a lot of private data on a single hard drive (one fool having all of his holiday snaps stored on a PS3 – nowhere else), this would be a genuine concern. Any would-be terrorist playing Modern Warfare 2 last week would have seen the doomsday scenario whereby an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) was blown above America, dropping planes and helicopters from the skies and shutting down computers, etc. Devices can be knocked out fine, but data – if it’s irrecoverable, is a disaster!

Imagine the end of Fight Club, when Jack and Marla witness the explosions as world credit card companies go boom, thus resetting debt back to zero. Sounds great – except what if it wasn’t credit card detail, but your bank account. Suddenly you’ve no money accounted for.

Of course, these scenarios are insane. People don’t trust “clouds” enough just yet, and even services like Apple’s mobileMe store data locally and simply sync it up at the moment. Even the online drive will store information on the local device.

It’s an interesting time. Where all of this goes we don’t know. Already with services like Spotify we don’t need music on our local disks, Netflix allows movies to be remote data too. Some day everything will be remote, large applications, rendering abilities, etc. It’s a utopian idea… as long as terrorists don’t blow an EMP on us, of course.