The power of the cloud: cheap, open, shared, efficient

Why does "Editor's note" say that Cloud is the future? Why is it that the cloud is not a spark but a revolutionary eruption? Why is it that the cloud is cheap, open, and shared, a real industry, a future that we select, edit, and share with the most recent reports from overseas?

1. New Moore's Law

For the first time, researchers have shown that the energy efficiency of computers will increase by one times every approximately 18 months. "The implication is that the battery energy required for a fixed amount of work is halved every 18 months," said Jonathan Koomey, the lead author of the study, professor of civil and environmental Engineering at Stanford University, Jonathan Kumi. With the steady improvement of energy efficiency, a larger number of mobile computing and sensing applications will be possible. In July this year, the Bank of America published a report pointing out that the world's data centers have increased electricity consumption by about 56% per cent from 2005 to 2010-a much lower-than-nearly-one-fold increase from 2000 to 2005.

While improvements in energy efficiency have played a part in this shift, data centers use less total power than estimated 2010, in part because newer servers are less installed than expected because technologies such as virtualization make it possible for existing systems to run more programs synchronously. Library beauty notes that computers in data centers rarely run programs with maximum power. Most computers, in fact, "are underutilized." "he said.

The information technology world is increasingly shifting its focus from increasing computing power to improving energy efficiency, especially as people become more accustomed to using smartphones, laptops, tablets and other battery-powered devices. "It is obviously important that everyone is familiar with Moore's law and the extraordinary ascent of the computer's ability to work," said Eric Brinjoforsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the US, Erik Brynjolfsson. However, more and more attention is being paid to the battery life of electronic devices and how quickly the equipment can run. "I think these are the things that are becoming more and more important to consumers, and to some extent, the law of the US--the trend of energy consumption--is making Moore's law seem to fade." ”

2. Shared Cloud System Design

If you invent something that is cheaper, more efficient, and more powerful than ever, you might want to think of the design as a secret. However, Facebook chose to do the opposite, with its 147000-square-foot computing center in Oregon State, which was officially opened in April this year, to make public all the blueprints from computer power to ultra-high-efficiency air-conditioning in buildings. Now, other companies are choosing the right design to cut the cost of similar buildings for cloud computing. The company wants to reduce the price of server computers by encouraging hardware vendors and partners to use their designs extensively. These servers deal with growing photos and information posted by Facebook's 750 million users. Only 6 months after the project began, there were indications that the strategy was effective and could reduce the cost of building cloud computing facilities in other industries. The cost of using these facilities will also be reduced.

Among these partners are chip manufacturers, Intel and AMD, which have helped Facebook's engineers improve the design of their customized motherboards on their servers to maximize computational performance with minimal power consumption. China's internet giants Tencent and Baidu are also involved. After visiting Facebook's facilities at Oregon State, Tencent engineers shared with Facebook engineers ways to improve the efficiency of distributed power in data centers. Even Apple, which recently released its own icloud service, tested the server on Facebook's design. Ultimately, open computing projects will exist independently of the companies they sponsor, as shared resources for the industry.

Facebook's projects are likely to be supported by some companies, as server manufacturers such as HP and Dell face the threat that business customers will no longer buy their own servers and use Third-party cloud systems such as those offered by companies like Amazon. "It procurement will be integrated into a handful of huge data centers." "The supplier's product plan and roadmap have not yet been changed," Frankowski said. "Research on the design of the largest cloud system operator can help suppliers reshape their production lines in the cloud era."

3. Cloud Computing Open Program

The Open System Foundation (OpenStack Foundation) announced that it would provide and maintain a set of free tool software for building and managing the cloud computing platform at a shelf-opening meeting in Boston. The software suite of an open system includes software for computing, storage, networking, and system management.

Today, many companies are scrambling to test the water cloud. Because it can use computer resources and storage space through simple leasing, it cuts down on the expensive upfront investment required by the information Technology Department. However, most cloud services are proprietary and their operational techniques are confidential. Once a company contracts with a cloud service provider, it may be difficult to switch to another provider.

Chris Kemp, who co-founded the Open-end project last year, Chris Camp in a speech that he was skeptical of the cloud-computing world dominated by major players like Amazon. "By relying on a large company to provide the infrastructure, they will decide how good it is to be good enough, how safe it is to be safe, how reliable it is and how cheap it is," Kemp said. ”

The Open System project has been supported by Amazon's rivals, the network hosting company storage space (Rackspace). Since its release in October 2010, the first version of its software has been downloaded 50,000 times. Some successful free and open source software projects, including Linux operating systems and Apache (Apache) Web servers, are supported by similar foundations. 115 organizations have supported open shelves, including Dell Computers, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, which have built cloud services using the technology. At least six different companies are already distributing these software. Open-shelf systems are not the only "Open-source" cloud service providers. Red Hat, which releases free software, has developed its own Open-source cloud, named Aeolus.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)