Cloudy and Cool

Outlook: mostly fine, with clouds increasing later and the chance of jargon rain likely

Calling this concentration of computing power a cloud brings to mind the current IT focus on environmental awareness. However, implementing clouds is currently anything but green. It seems the message of reduce, reuse, recycle has been cloud-transformed to increase overuse (of) gigacycle.

The top five search companies (Google, Ask, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL) require an estimated 5 gigawatts of power annually to run their combined facilities. This is enough power to run an entire large city for a day, adding substantial carbon to the greenhouse effect, which therefore increases atmospheric humidity. The more we use cloud computing, the more we'll get clouds (and storms and floods and droughts). As one of the uses of stream computing is to provide compute-intensive climate forecasting, scientists will be able to forecast climate changes that are due to the compute power required to forecast climate change. Still, that's a small price to pay for instant access to data from anywhere (left) on the planet.

Processing power is not the only aspect that's growing, there's also storage. The Internet is gaining petabytes per day of globally housed, individually-oriented data. The bulk of data is relevant to only a small number of people, often just to the person himself (and sometimes, not even then) and much of this data is stored many times across the Internet. It's the information equivalent of all the junk normally stored around the home being dumped in a huge warehouse. We're moving from World Wide Web to World Wide Shed, storing all our data in a ClutterPlex.

I predict Google's next purchase will be a nuclear power plant provider, to provide the PowerPlex next to each GooglePlex. It's getting ComPlex. They are only called clouds when they float above you, out of reach. Once they're all around you, it's a fog.

Is this current rise of clouds due to a rush of unsustained hot air (it has been known to happen before in the Internet space), an exciting new era or just another turn in the computing cycle?