Computing - the next twenty years

[andrewducker]

This is a writeup of a presentation on where computing is going.  It's both entertaining and fascinating.

I have no clue about what high-performance computing will look like 20 years from now.

So, I asked a few of my colleagues. The answers can be summarized simply, since there were only three, really:

A blank stare. This was the most common reaction. Like “Look, I have a deadline tomorrow.”

Laughter. I understand that response completely.

And, finally, someone said: What an incredible opportunity! You get to make totally outrageous statements that you’ll never be held accountable for! How about offshore data centers, powered by wave motion, continuously serviced by autonomous robots with salamander-level consciousness, spidering around replacing chicklet-sized compute units, all made by the world’s largest computer vendor – Haier! [They make refrigerators.] And lots of graphs, all going up to the right!
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Moore’s Law won’t end with a bang; it will end with a whimper. It will gradually fade out in a period stretching over at least two decades.
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Computing will in general become cheaper – but not necessarily that much faster.
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There will be TeraFLOPS on everybody’s lap, at least for some values of “lap”; lap may really be pocket or purse.
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Computing will be done either on one’s laptop / cellphone / whatever; or out in a bloody huge mist/fog/cloud -like thing somewhere. There may be a hierarchy of such cloud resources, but I don’t think anybody will get charged up about what level they happen to be using at the moment.

Absolutely worth a look if you're interested in the future of computing.

Comments

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

In some ways we're coming around the circle again ... computing is handled by BIG machines somewhere else, we pay for how much of the resource we use on BIG METAL but use local machines to do the equivalent of punching cards or paper tape (building queries, rendering the XML data streams that return etc.) ... even fairly recently (possibly still now) companies like IBM will sell you a box with more power than you need, and just charge you for what you actually use (so if you want to upgrade the box, they just flip a switch to turn on another CPU and charge you an extra 35% or whatever) and licence the software the same way (if you have two people using it, it costs $X, ten people, then 3x$X).

Computing will become more invisible. The iPhone does pretty much nothing that a SonyEricsson P910i couldn't do five years ago (multi touch is the only obvious thing, and the GPS sensor was an external unit the size of a matchbox), but it does it cleaner, smoother and less "techy" than the SE phone.

The winners of the technology wars won't be "Linux" or "DOS", it will be the ones that let you access functionality as easily as possible and make it fun to use. V+ and Sky+ took the PVR and made it a home appliance, easier to use than a VHS recorder.

Most people don't care if their phone supports SyncML or EDR or BT2.1, but want to be able to have their contacts back if/when their phone gets lost/stolen/wet/upgraded, and if they can do other fun things with it like share videos of drunken mates at the pub or Mary's first baby steps, then that will be cool too!

The things in the Nokia Mixed Reality video could all be done *now* ... in 20 years we could have augmented reality as standard. No more "mobile phone" or "computer" ... just a display that appears in front of your eyes when you want it to and applications that "know" where you are, what you are doing and so can provide the information you are likely to need (again nothing that can't be done now-ish ... ) ... but that's for us of the advanced technology world ... there will still be people in countries without clean running water, without electricity, without easy access to medicine ...

"even the oft-derided Parallel PowerPoint – actually make sense, as a way to extend the life of your cell phone battery charge."
I know there will be quad-core cell phones appearing in the next few years, and only the number of cores required for your current applications will be switched on.

[andrewducker]

IBM still sell mainframes based on usage - we pay for the processor time we use on the mainframe (smoothed and based on 95% of peak, or something like that).

I don't think we're heading back to centralised processing though - it's too handy to be able to run stuff on my local PC. But there will continue to be a division of data and processing between local PCs and servers.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course we'll still run things locally, probably most things that we want to do day to day, but things like the Google maps walking/driving directions, large databases of photographs of street imagery, large media libraries (music, film, books) etc. are likely to be *mostly* in the cloud/big metal ... particularly for changing information ... memory cards are getting cheaper and more capacious (when I bought my 512Mb SD card it was £99 at Jessops, on sale, now I would expect to spend no more than a fiver for a 2Gb SD card ... when I bought my 512Kb card for my Psion 3 it was again around £100)

I was about to make some future prediction about central servers resizing video and TV and streaming it to your personal device ... when I realised you can do that with iPlayer and some of our phones right now, or with a Slingbox for your own personal content.

We're getting to a interesting cusp of media though ... if you can listen to whatever you want, when you want, on Last.fm/pandora/spotify/whatever, or buy and download it (with album covers and additional material) from iTunes, or download it from a torrent site, or buy a physical CD ... which do you do?

And video is just getting to that point ... I used to "download and store" by setting the VCR and keeping the tapes. There's still a certain amount I "download and store" by having the HD recorder catch them and then burn them to DVD+R. But US shows I can download on torrent sites tend to mean I don't record them from UK TV stations weeks or months later.
But what happens when I can just pick the series I want to watch and have it stream (or download) at any time ... do I still keep copies locally? (Probably, I'm a hoarder).

[andrewducker]

I think there'll be a lot of cloud stuff - with local caching/processing. Take Google Maps for mobile - where you can go to a place you've been recently and it'll get the map tiles from cache - or go somewhere new and it'll get them from the server. Or spotify for mobile, where you can set up your cache before leaving home, so that you don't need to connect while you're out of (cheap) signal.

I'm in the midst of getting rid of my VHS tapes (130 to go!), and some of them had been replaced by DVDs - but I have an Apple TV in the living room, and if I can rent a movie for £3 then I don't bother ordering the DVD to watch it...

TV is still more expensive to watch via iTunes - 99p per episode is more than I'm willing to pay when I can get the DVD for less than that - but it's getting there...

[pisica.livejournal.com]

My next novel is set about a hundred years in the future, though the world has taken a nosedive in the meantime. I'm including some virtual reality but I really have no idea what to do about the computing infrastructure. Which is kind of essential. *panics*

[broin.livejournal.com]

cf modern Africa and India?

[andrewducker]

If there's a crash followed by a rise then you can have whatever level of technology suits your story best. Just make sure it's coherent!

If you want to run anything past me I'd be glad to help out.