[CAnet - news] Computing is moving from boxes to networks- NY Times article

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 [Some excerpts from today's NY Times article -- BSA]


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/technology/techspecial/05markoff.html

The Time Is Now: Bust Up the Box!
By JOHN MARKOFF

COMPUTING is breaking out of the beige box. Millions of miles of fiber-optic
cables are weaving together software that lives on the Internet and data
moving at the speed of light into a single global fabric.

It has been almost two decades since Sun Microsystems pioneered the slogan
"the network is the computer." Today, after many false starts, that idea is
a reality.

Where software applications like Microsoft Word or Autodesk's AutoCAD were
once standalone monoliths that functioned in just a single machine, the new
distributed applications are now remarkably adaptable. They are frequently
spread across large and small computer systems in order to harness more
processing power, and programs now dart about through the networks,
relocating themselves to save power or to use resources more efficiently.

Moreover, for everyday Web surfers, an exploding array of services is being
built by using the software equivalent of Lego blocks, as companies like
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft begin to make software components available to
"mash-up," that is, to link programs running on different servers in
different places, in new distributed applications on multiple computers and
frequently available free.

Earlier this year a classic mash-up was created by Paul Rademacher, a
Silicon Valley programmer who connected apartment rentals on the Craigslist
Web site with Google Maps, in the process creating a new Web service, a
program that resides simultaneously in many places on the Internet.

That model has initiated a growing array of applications involving so-called
distributed computing for corporations, consumers and scientists. "Today we
are Google-mashing everything," said Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of
advanced networks for Canarie, a government-sponsored high-speed network
based in Ottawa that links research laboratories.

It is now possible to connect computers on opposite sides of the world by an
optical fiber capable of carrying 10 billion bits of information a second.

Known as "lambdas" - an industry term for optical circuits that carry data -
these data superhighways are making it possible to create a new class of
supercomputers that have no geographical boundaries.

The implications of ultrafast computer networks composed of optical fibers
that stretch around the globe could be seen clearly last month at a
supercomputer network workshop, iGrid 2005, held at Calit2's La Jolla
building.

At iGrid last month a network capacity of 100 billion bits per second was
connected to the new Calit2 building, allowing prototypes of scientific
visualization applications that have not previously been possible.

There were demonstrations of brute networking power: using networks capable
of carrying more than a billion bits of data a second to carry a super
high-definition video conference over 9,000 miles between Tokyo and La
Jolla, accompanied by a separate stream of hi-fidelity digital sound
produced by musicians at LucasArts in Northern California.

There were also the first demonstrations of a new generation of
supercomputing power made possible by emerging optical networks like the
Global Lambda Integrated Facility, the National Lambda Rail and Teragrid.

These networks not only make it possible to harness the power of multiple
supercomputers, but they also allow scientists to create a new class of
instruments, in which huge volumes of scientific data are easily available
to researchers around the globe.

For example, at the iGrid symposium scientists showed the first
high-definition digital video broadcast from an undersea volcanic vent more
than a mile beneath the ocean off the northwest coast of the United States.

The video comes from a new undersea observatory being constructed by a
United States-Canadian partnership. The system will consist of a web of
computers interconnected by fiber-optic sensors on the sea floor intended to
monitor everything from geological to climate changes.

The distributed computing system will collect data from thousands of sensors
of different types that allow the researchers to build a complete picture of
the undersea world.

"This is the new computational science," said Edward Lazowska, a computer
scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the project
investigators. In the future, he said, science will be based on data flowing
across computer networks that can then be visualized and mined.


So far, the new epoch of computing has been described as grid computing,
on-demand computing, utility computing, the planetary computer and Web 2.0.

Although the titles are different, they are all efforts to describe an age
that will be a fundamental break from earlier computing generations. [...]

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[email protected]
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
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[email protected]
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
SkypeIn: +1 614 441-9603


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