Unit 8, Article 39: Google and the Wisdom of Clouds: A lofty new strategy aims to put incredible computing power in the hands of many.

Reference

Baker, S. (2007). Google and the wisdom of clouds: A lofty new strategy aims to put incredible computing power in the hands of many. In P. De Palma (Ed.), Annual Editions: Computers in Society 10/11 (pp. 181-185). New York: McGraw Hill.

Summary

Cloud computing is a relatively new concept. Clouds are giant clusters of machines that are all working together over the internet; a cluster could consist of 100 computers or 1,000 – depending on the job that needs done. Clusters of computers working together are powerful because they can handle jobs that one machine would just get bogged down in – and they can handle these jobs with great speed. Clusters are also great because they evolve with changing technology; as each machine in a cluster gets old or breaks, engineers replace single machines one at a time without affecting the ability of the cloud to continue processing data.

Google, with its massive search engines and other applications has learned to leverage cloud computing very effectively. Their algorithms and strategy are largely kept a secret from outsiders since Google’s ability to use cloud computing is a major part of the company’s success. This article talks about one employee at Google, Basciglia, that recognized a need to train college students on the concepts of cloud computing. Basciglia developed a course known as Google 101 to train college students at University of Washington on the concepts of cloud computing. The course was hugely popular and has now spread to other universities. Since the Google cloud is not available to the public, university students have begun to develop a cloud of their own machines where they learn how to develop algorithms and programs that leverage the power of cloud computing. Many of the students who take the Google 101 course have gotten jobs working for Google or other large companies such as IBM after graduation.

Reaction

This article talks about the huge power that we have in the web at this point in time and suggests that in the future we will look back and think that our current concept of the web is “tiny” compared to what it will be able to do in the future. I believe that this is true. The rate at which the volume of information on the internet has grown over the past 10 years is astonishing. Now, more and more people are putting information into the web, not only to we create websites, but each time we click on a link we contribute our choice is saved on a server somewhere which contributes to the vast amount of data that can be accessed via the web. I think the future of the web is both exciting and scary. I am not sure how I feel about other people being able to obtain so much information about me by monitoring what I do online, what I write in my emails, and what other people write or post about me. I am glad that there is not universal ID that I use every time I log into a computer. This, at least, provides some anonymity, but I know that information about most of my life can be found on the servers that don’t belong to me. The web is exciting, though, because of all that we can use it for. All of the data online is great for research and brings a new era to teaching and learning.