Idea of the Week: Five Computers Is All the World Needs

By Doug Barney

My new tech hero is Greg Papadopoulos, CTO for Sun Microsystems of Mountain View, CA. Like Sun itself, Papadopoulos is spunky, opinionated, and far removed from mainstream thinking.

At first I was going to just write about Greg’s theory that the world will run on five main computers (since I have 7 running at my house at any given time I was instantly skeptical). Here Greg is not talking about our personal machines. He’s talking about big honking clusters that support Yahoo, Google, Microsoft Live, Salesforce.com, and the like. This shows a true belief in the future of cloud computing, and our willingness to turn over data and hosting to a small number of concentrated economic entities.

Greg’s blog is cool in that later entries build on themes established by earlier writing. In this case when I looked again at the five-computers essay, I found a more detailed analysis of the relationship between hardware and software. Papadopoulos talks about Red Shift, which refers to those companies and applications that continue to outstrip Moore’s law and are best served by server farms, clusters, multicores, and anything that gives the code more juice. He includes enterprise apps such as ERP and CRM, and consumer-focused Web apps (how many times have you used Google or YouTube today – oh, I forgot, they’re now the same thing!).

He also talks about HPC, and the fact that if you cut the price of HPC in half, engineers and such will buy (and use) twice as much. High-performance users like engineers are clearly Red Shifters!

How many computers will we need in the future, and can the cloud ever render a 16 million-color ray-traced image? Write me at barneymailto:[email protected].

To get to Greg’s point about the five computers, you’ll need to scroll down – he’s a somewhat prolific blogger! This is one blog that’s well worth a bookmark.

http://blogs.sun.com/gregp/