Comments on: Personal Cloud Computing + Netbooks = Mobile Supercomputing?

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:40:45 +0000

I have been pondering the same idea. A couple of problems:

Core apps for business remain Microsoft products (Word, PPT, and Excel, etc). Not sure how to get these on the cloud–or what they would cost. What I have seen of cloud-based versions of these are not quite ready for prime time.

Another twist on the device side is “resurrection” of old machines. Put a simple OS and a browser on them and they could live forever as cloud-access devices.

Finally for small businesses, the full cost of ownership for local devices, including decent (and often missing) backup makes the cloud seem cheaper and safer.

Last, of course, is the mystery of cloud security and who can see proprietary information. As consultant, it does not make me feel great to know that Microsoft can peer into docs on Office Live. After all, we know they are evil, we just don’t know how evil. For example, would you store your new software code there?

By: vm-01

vm-01 — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:01:06 +0000

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2343703,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532

I’d love for this to work. I wouldn’t mind using this for the more demanding games and leave my retro gaming for when I’m mobile.

The torrent server idea may be too expensive for now but next year it might just work.

WOOT

By: Wilfred

Wilfred — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:08:52 +0000

Kevin,

What I am really excited about is the use of the cloud for large scale on-demand testing as in exams. Heck, everyone can have their own personal tests as and when they need on demand based on how ready they are.

By: thegeniusfiles

thegeniusfiles — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:12:13 +0000

This is a fascinating idea. It conjures visions of ubiquitous computing, with your data, programs and settings available from anywhere. In my case, latency would be a problem, but hopefully this issue will be solved over time. One advantage of this approach is that you would not be stuck with a rapidly-depreciating server to purchase and own. It is likely that Amazon will enjoy economies of scale which will lead to better infrastructure. You could concentrate your capital on acquiring a really nice display. But the speed (or lack therof) of the connection is the bottleneck which must be solved.

By: vm-01

vm-01 — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:01:51 +0000

There seems to be some work done already on my latter wish.

Time to hit the virtual books!

By: vm-01

vm-01 — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:59:19 +0000

Another potential use of course is gaming. If a service that already stores my games, like steam, somehow manages to install and render the games the way quake online does it then we have a very cool new way to game on our little notebooks.

A virtual torrent server would also be awesome. Price permitting.

By: Robert

Robert — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:09:37 +0000

Sorry, but I think I am missing something. Amazon are charging the eauivalent of $2.40 – $19.20 per day that just about every other Virtual Hosting Server operation is offering for under $10 per month.

Is it me?

By: vm-01

vm-01 — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:15:15 +0000

Interesting idea KCT and I would love to be able to send my encoding jobs to a server but as Scotty said it would be ridiculously expensive since S3 charges for the transfer of those large video files. You would also spend more time sending files than it would take for even a netbook to do encoding.

Very cool concept but it’s not here yet.

Levi seems to have a nice current solution but in my case I personally would still run into slow bandwith problems.

By: Decade

Decade — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:25:15 +0000

This doesn’t seem that practical. As bandwidth increases, content sizes increase, and local processing power also increases. MP3 encoding used to take a lot of CPU time, but it was practical because bandwidth was so low. Now, it’s barely practical to upload raw audio, but you’d probably spend more time uploading to the cloud than encoding, even on a netbook. Video will continue to increase to the largest feasible resolution and bandwidth for quite a while yet; you don’t want to see what sorts of file sizes you get with lossless video.

I guess it could make sense to run video in the cloud if you’re transcoding to all manner of resolutions and bandwidth for optimal viewing on lots of devices, but that’s not a common consumer task.

You insist that video is just an example. I’ve been casually watching the high-performance computing community, and bandwidth is actually a really big issue. Very few interesting problems don’t require a large amount of bandwidth, and up to now the problems always increase to fill all available bandwidth.

Also, bandwidth isn’t increasing as smoothly as you’d like. The phone companies are evil, especially AT&T, and they’re dragging their feet on increasing bandwidth. Cell phone companies would rather you didn’t use their bandwidth. And WiFi gets really slow if you have a lot of neighbors, especially if they’re attached to the same access point, especially if it’s connected to DSL or something else relatively slow.

Now, I’ve been thinking that it might be practical to have a virtual desktop out in the cloud, that can be accessed by any computer where you happen to be. The data would already be in it, so bandwidth wouldn’t be a problem. But I wouldn’t classify that as supercomputing.

By: Netbook Insider Forum

Netbook Insider Forum — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:36:08 +0000

Have you look at Microsoft’s Mesh? (https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/overview/Overview.aspx) It answers a lot of “personal cloud” computing needs, such as file, application and computer synchronization and availability.