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.

[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*