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

[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...