Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/9706
n n n n Trends & Technologies cable. We replaced that cable with an Ether- net cable. People tried to do this before, but their solutions required tons of bandwidth, or they degraded image quality, or they buffered, which introduces latency. While many vid- eoconferencing systems work just fine, those technologies don’t have the resolution and low-latency qualities you need to remotely run a CAD application over the Web. We need latencies that are sub-50 msec. Te best stan- dard compression technologies out there have about 250 msec and can eat up 10mb of band- width for HD video. Twitch can go as low as 3mb, with latencies as low as 10 msec. So with Twitch, we have all the benefits of a SaaS application—easy to implement, no capital expenditure, collaboration, real-time data ac- cess, data centralization—with all the benefits of desktop software because we are running desktop software. Oh, and it runs better than your current desktop software because we have super-tricked- out hardware in a data center that is dedicated to you when you’re awake, but the price is lower since we re-use that system while you’re asleep. Before, if someone in New York and London wanted to collaborate, they constantly had to move their files and versions around. But if you can just move the video around, you can leave the data in the data center, and you have instant access to it over fibre channel. Tis is the first no-compromise SaaS solution—benefits of the desktop with all of the power of the Web. How does SaaS come into play? SaaS is not just about doing stuff faster. You can now take a 1000-CPU-hour computation and run it on one machine for 1000 hours and it costs the same as if you ran it on 1000 com- puters for one hour. In the past, that was not the case. You can now rent supercomputers in the cloud by the second, giving you access to compute power you never had before. One example of this is Showroom. Imagine laying out a kitchen floor plan and getting a physi- cally accurate photorealistic rendering in four seconds. Normally that would take four CPU hours, but with 2000 cores, you can squeeze that into four seconds. Te Project Showroom concept is about letting you do really high- quality rendering in near real time by using thousands of cores. Technically, writing soft- ware for that is different than how you write desktop software. At Labs, I look at our recently acquired anal- ysis, simulation, and visualization technologies, and consider how to adapt all those engines into a supercomputer in the cloud. If you want to design a green building or a sustainable build- 30 April 2010 Project Showroom lets users mix and match product selections, textures, and colors from leading manufacturers using a Web browser. ing, someday we’ll do real-time simulation while you are designing. Currently, people design the building, send it out to an analysis firm; a few weeks later the results are sent back, and it either meets code or fails, in which case you have to redesign it. If we can have the analysis happen- ing in the background while you are designing so every couple of seconds you get a result back, you will design a better building. What allowed all this innovation to occur? A combination of many things. Like any in- novation, it is evolution on a path. You have to have the Internet, search engines, content that is in a searchable universal format, rendering, and simulation technology. All this informa- tion has to be written in such a way that it can be done in parallel over multiple cores rather than just faster single cores, an operating sys- tem that can manage a large number of cores, and network implications. Most Web appli- cations use redundant components, and it is very expensive. Tat is how most Web hard- ware is built—expensive and reliable. Tat’s great for normal Web apps. But when you get into cloud computation, you no longer want to use the same approach; you want the soft- ware to be fault tolerant, not the hardware. In this way, you can buy much cheaper hardware. Tat is another innovation—you get the price down, and then you need a business model. Most people cannot run their own big super- computer centers, and that is where Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2 come in—they offer computers that are rentable on-demand and priced by the minute. Tese services are all focused at the small players right now. Bigger companies generally run their own data centers at some scale, but they have to have the machines. Te equip- ment has to cover their peak usage, and they have to buy enough for that one hour a year, for the worst-case scenario. Te rest of the year it goes unused. Now with cloud computing, the bigger companies can right-size the big data centers so they can buy based on the aver- age, and when the need arises, they can make an API call and burst the application into EC2, for example. It makes for a more efficient data center and drives the cost of computing down dramatically—and that drives innovation. Moore’s Law has computing power dou- bling every 18 months. Now we are seeing Moore’s Law to the third dimension with cloud computing. Moore’s Law has always been two dimensional—two dimensions on a chip, a two-dimensional surface. In a data center, you can stack computers into the third dimension and you get a different Moore’s Law through Web access. So the cost of computing is going down, and that has implications across all our lives—entertainment, medical, and so forth. Is this invention or innovation? What really counts is innovation, not just invention. Invention is great, but until you innovate about how to use it and solve a real- world problem with a real-world delivery plat- form, invention is only intellectually interest- ing for us geeks. But innovation is where the productivity gains come from. It is how you bring sometimes-old ideas together to solve real-world problems, and you’ve got to involve the customer in the process. n