Small and Distributed
Wednesday, 8. July 2009, 19:21:55
In computing world these days things tend to get small and there seem to be many.
The Small
What's small? Netbooks. Cheap, small, power efficient. Someone realized that by far not everyone needs mega monster PCs that are on the shelves. Taking crysis into account, no one needs mega expensive PCs and so the netbooks are born. And here I have to mention the Intel Atom processor line. We will remember it later.
The Many
As things aren't really getting more powerful we need more of them. CPUs can't be really made much faster so we just add more of them. Six core CPUs in the market. And lets not forget the Intel's research project with 80 cores.
Since you can't put too much in a box there are many boxes - servers.
Everything is distributed now. Take Google Apps Engine Datastore for example. Event the tables of the same applications database can be on different servers, even the same table... Things are processed in parallel and then joined (the Map Reduce algorithm).
Where are we going?
We are leaning towards merging the Small with the Many to make things Distributed and Specialized.
The trend is to make things specialized. Database servers, storage servers, application servers are no longer residing in a single machine. They are seperated, though usually run on the same operating system, same hardware. And this will have to go... Why waste resources on operating system when the only useful peace of software running is database server? There will be dedicated pseudo-OS'es written that will do their jobs. Traditional filesystems will be gone on database servers, no more files, just the records.
Since we need many, we want power efficient and cheap, right? Dedicated chips for each purpose will come. Why waste silicium on implementing CPU operations that will never be used? You have to agree x86 is a bit of a bloated hardware.
Intel Atom is coming out as dual-core. I wouldn't be surprised if some version dropping multimedia extensions and bringing back some stuff that has bin cut out would be introduced someday (pipelines? - though I don't think they pay off).
Conclusion
Computing buisness will be optimized to squeeze the maximum out of every dollar spent. So Many will have to be made small and specialized.
The Small
What's small? Netbooks. Cheap, small, power efficient. Someone realized that by far not everyone needs mega monster PCs that are on the shelves. Taking crysis into account, no one needs mega expensive PCs and so the netbooks are born. And here I have to mention the Intel Atom processor line. We will remember it later.
The Many
As things aren't really getting more powerful we need more of them. CPUs can't be really made much faster so we just add more of them. Six core CPUs in the market. And lets not forget the Intel's research project with 80 cores.
Since you can't put too much in a box there are many boxes - servers.
Everything is distributed now. Take Google Apps Engine Datastore for example. Event the tables of the same applications database can be on different servers, even the same table... Things are processed in parallel and then joined (the Map Reduce algorithm).
Where are we going?
We are leaning towards merging the Small with the Many to make things Distributed and Specialized.
The trend is to make things specialized. Database servers, storage servers, application servers are no longer residing in a single machine. They are seperated, though usually run on the same operating system, same hardware. And this will have to go... Why waste resources on operating system when the only useful peace of software running is database server? There will be dedicated pseudo-OS'es written that will do their jobs. Traditional filesystems will be gone on database servers, no more files, just the records.
Since we need many, we want power efficient and cheap, right? Dedicated chips for each purpose will come. Why waste silicium on implementing CPU operations that will never be used? You have to agree x86 is a bit of a bloated hardware.
Intel Atom is coming out as dual-core. I wouldn't be surprised if some version dropping multimedia extensions and bringing back some stuff that has bin cut out would be introduced someday (pipelines? - though I don't think they pay off).
Conclusion
Computing buisness will be optimized to squeeze the maximum out of every dollar spent. So Many will have to be made small and specialized.
WIDGETIZE