2009/06/19
TheRegister: Intel clones your phone in the cloud
by Rik Myslewski
Intel demoed this fledgling tech this morning at its seventh annual Research@Intel event in Mountain View, California. As Intel researcher Byung-Gon Chun told The Reg, the Clone Cloud is designed - as its name suggests - to create a clone of your smartphone's data and apps and run them in a cloud environment where they can take advantage of far more computing power than could ever be squeezed into a pocketable device.
Thanks to a stack living on your smartphone and another on a host device - which could either be dedicated hardware or a virtualized instance - your phone (or netbook, nettop, MID, or whatever) could live a schizoid life, existing both in your pocket and in the cloud.
When you ask your handheld to perform a computational task that would benefit from more horsepower, the device and the cloud could negotiate at run-time to determine how best to satisfy your request. If the cloud can help, it will - delivering the results back to your handheld.
Of course, offloading computationally expensive operations from clients to hosts is not new. The Clone Cloud is different, however, in that the client/host relationship dissolves into the cloud. The smartphone isn't getting data from an application running in the cloud. The smartphone itself is running in the cloud in clone form.
The cloud, by the way, doesn't have to live on big iron in a data center. The Clone Cloud concept is designed to scale down to a point where the host could be your laptop or desktop machine.
To demonstrate the power of the Clone Cloud, Chun ran an image-processing task that took a minute and a half on a smartphone. On the smartphone's clone, the same task took a second and a half - including the transmission time - and the process was seamless. To the user, it simply looked like one hella-fast smartphone.
Chun sees five major types of usage for the Clone Cloud:
Primary: In this most-basic implementation, the handheld manages user interface and other "low-octane" tasks, and offloads more computationally intensive processes to the cloud. Communication between the devices is done in real time, transparent to the user.
Background: This scenario is designed to allow processes that don't require immediate user interaction - virus scans, for example - to take place on the clone of the device that resides in the cloud, and then communicate back to the device when they're complete.
Mainline: A cross between the Primary and Background scenarios, in this implementation the clone checks in with the handheld at predetermined intervals during the running of an application. It could, for example, be used for debugging, where the clone could "rewind" at a given checkpoint if a bug appeared.
Hardware: In this scenario, the clone calls on other hardware resources and file systems to drastically boost the clone's capabilities. For example, instead of running a process on an ARM emulator in the clone, it could instead dig directly down to its underlying hardware. In effect, you could have a Xeon 5500, InfiniBand smartphone.
Multiplicity: Finally, multiple clones of the same handheld could be created to enable parallelization of tasks. While Chun refers to this as an "extravagant" use of compute power in terms of the energy used, it could provide a decisive computational boost in, for example, critical parallelized statistical analyses in emergency medical use.
You can find more information on the Clone Cloud concept in Chun's detailed paper (PDF), "Augmented Smartphone Applications Through Clone Cloud Execution", co-authored by fellow Intel researcher Petros Maniatis. ®
InfoWorld: Google vs. Bing: The fear stops here
by Robert X. Cringely
It isn't quite up to the New York Post's gold standard – "Headless Man Found in Topless Bar" – but the Post's "Fear Grips Google" story over the weekend certainly got some attention, if only for its over-the-top headline.
According to "insider sources" the Post conveniently declines to describe, let alone identify...
Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned.
Well, duh. If Google weren't paying attention to Bing, it wouldn't be Google. But "rattled"? Please. When you own 60 to 80 percent of the search market, depending on who's counting, I don't think a 2 point percentage gain by a distant-third-place competitor is worth pulling the covers up over your head at night.
(Though I have to admit that Hannibal Lecterish graphic the Post ran of Ballmer is kind of frightening. He looks like he's about to bite Larry Page on the face. I'm gripped with fear just looking at it.)
SearchEngineLand's Greg Sterling has a somewhat less adrenaline-fueled take on what's likely happening over at the Googleplex:
Bing is probably better than Google anticipated and early indications are favorable in terms of user adoption; however not on any scale to threaten Google's position. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is taking Bing seriously and trying to carefully assess its algorithm.
My take: This is Rupert Murdoch's way of jabbing his poison pen into Google, which newspaper publishers have loudly (though somewhat inaccurately) blamed for the demise of their industry. Or maybe he sees it as a competitor to MySpace, or maybe it's just cuz Al Gore is on their board, and we all know how Rupe feels about green pinkos (or is that pink greenos?). In any case, it's a hit piece, and it's not the first one the Murdochians have aimed at Google.
CNet: Will Google Wave reshape enterprise IT?
by Matt Asay
Google blew the minds of developers with the introduction of its innovative Google Wave, a new approach to real-time content collaboration, but its odds of breezing into enterprise computing anytime soon remain remote.
Within enterprise IT departments, starved for compelling ways to collaborate on application development, however, Google Wave may find a ready audience.
Enterprise computing remains in the Stone Age, by modern standards, a topic nicely addressed by the Financial Times recently. While the consumer Internet offers diverse ways to connect (via Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and other services), the enterprise remains somewhat buttoned-down, relegated to Microsoft Exchange and the occasional fling with IBM's Lotus.
Pardon me while I stifle a yawn.
This isn't necessarily Microsoft's or IBM's fault, of course. Both offer other products that push the envelope on enterprise computing. But it's hard for enterprises to easily digest rapid-fire innovation, and it's not exactly easy for software vendors to recoup investments in groundbreaking innovations, either, as RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady noted in his review of Google Wave:
We don't see a lot of dramatic leaps forward in software, I'd argue, both because it's exceedingly difficult to develop and launch revolutionary products, and because the economics act against it.
It's difficult, of course, to produce them: how many vendors can afford the indulgence of turning high-quality resources loose on a multiyear project with no clear revenue plan in place? But it can be even more difficult to market (or sell such revolutionary products) because, well, they're not what people are used to, and they take some explaining.
So, given that Google Wave may have moved much further than most enterprises are able to willing to accept, at least for now, what good is it?
Most of the world's software is...written by enterprises for internal use.Equitas IT Solutions' Ryan Cartwright suggests an answer. He indicates that Wave offers "the chance to...make a big improvement in the way we develop free software."
He's absolutely right, but why stop there?
Most of the world's software is not written by open-source software developers, nor is it written by Microsoft or other traditional software vendors. It's written by enterprises for internal use. As such, if Google Wave has the potential to facilitate software development by facilitating real-time collaboration on code-
and it does-then why not unleash its potential within enterprise application development?Google Wave may well crash on the shore of enterprise adoption, but I suspect that it may well roll into the enterprise, anyway, as a code collaboration tool deployed by enterprise IT for its own use. Eventually, that "personal" consumption should trickle out to business users clamoring for their enterprise-computing experience to catch up with their consumer-computing world.
This could be Google's game to lose.
