Computing Heads for the Clouds

IBM, Yahoo!, and Google are all putting the power of cloud computing to work. Here's a short primer on how the new technology works

By Aaron Ricadela

Researchers seeking smarter ways to tackle the most complicated computing tasks think they've found the answer in a cloud—though not the kind that wafts across the sky as masses of condensed water droplets and frozen crystals. Instead, they're turning to something called cloud computing, which aims to deliver supercomputing power over the Internet.

IBM (IBM) is the most recent company to announce plans to tap cloud computing technologies. On Nov. 15, IBM executives in Shanghai unveiled a system, dubbed Blue Cloud, that will let banks and other customers distribute their programs across large numbers of machines to deliver faster, more sophisticated data analysis. The first Blue Cloud products are due in the spring of 2008.

Supercomputing for the Rest of Us

Two top Internet companies recently announced similar projects. Yahoo! (YHOO) on Nov. 12 said Carnegie Mellon University, and eventually other schools, will use a 4,000-processor computer housed at the Web company to conduct software research. And Google (GOOG), the steward of what's effectively one of the world's largest supercomputers used to power its search engine, in October said it would make hundreds of processors in its data centers available to schools including the University of Washington, Stanford University, and MIT to help teach high-performance computing programming techniques.

"All of these are examples of the frenzy around cloud computing," says Dan Reed, a longtime supercomputing researcher who will start work as Microsoft's (MSFT) director of Scalable & Multicore Computing on Dec. 3. Fueling that frenzy, says Reed, is the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections, cheaper and more powerful chips and disk drives, and the development of data centers that house hundreds or thousands of computers to quickly serve sophisticated software to legions of users. "None of this would have been possible a decade ago," he adds.

Herewith, a primer on how companies—and consumers—might harness cloud computing's power:

How does cloud computing work?
Supercomputers today are used mainly by the military, government intelligence agencies, universities and research labs, and large companies to tackle enormously complex calculations for such tasks as simulating nuclear explosions, predicting climate change, designing airplanes, and analyzing which proteins in the body are likely to bind with potential new drugs. Cloud computing aims to apply that kind of power—measured in the tens of trillions of computations per second—to problems like analyzing risk in financial portfolios, delivering personalized medical information, even powering immersive computer games, in a way that users can tap through the Web. It does that by networking large groups of servers that often use low-cost consumer PC technology, with specialized connections to spread data-processing chores across them. By contrast, the newest and most powerful desktop PCs process only about 3 billion computations a second.