Many businesses use payroll bureaux rather than employ an accountant to
wrestle with the complexities of PAYE and National Insurance. In the future
companies will outsource much of their computing in the same way, says John
Manley, director of Utility Computing Research at HP Labs. Highly efficient
suppliers will use virtual systems, such as servers, storage and networking
appliances, to provide on-demand computing as a service. Data centres won’t go
away, but much of the heavy lifting or routine work will be outsourced to
specialist service providers that can do it more efficiently and more flexibly.
This is already happening in a few specialised fields. HP Labs helped
DreamWorks SKG outsource a substantial portion of the computer power needed to
animate films such as Madagascar and Over the Hedge. For Shrek 2, HP supplied
over 100 processor-years of number crunching to turn animators’ models into
frames of film. It has also worked with a Formula 1 team to do computational
fluid dynamics (a kind of digital wind tunnel) and with investment banks to
create automatic trading systems based on models of the stock market.
While these early pioneers have clearly defined requirements for lots and
lots of processing power, the same model could, in future, apply to company
databases and other business software applications. For example, a supermarket
chain could use one of these instant supercomputers to mine its customer data
for the latest trends. |
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