Can Europe keep up?

I then attended a panel discussion on R&D in Europe, which given the attendees was pretty self congratulatory. HP’s VP for Labs is a Brit, and was on the panel. The reason I mention this is that he was the only employee of a global IT company i.e. one not quoted in Europe, who spoke in a plenary session. They sort of said “Great Research, no IT manufacturing” , …

Visions of Future Computing

After lunch, with wine, it is in France after all, I attended a session called “Visions of Future Computing and Communication Paradigms”. Frustratingly this was not video’d and nor can I find the slides on the USB stick they gave us. So you’ll have to rely on my memory; I didn’t take any notes. The first two speakers, although their presentations weren’t designed to show the difference between IT people and computer scientists, did exctly that.  …

The SuperNAP

I was invited to visit Switch Communication’s Supernap facility. This must be the best datacentere in the world. It is purpose built, and designed to host new age high density computing. They set out to build a 35Kw/Rack data centre and every decision they took was to enable this goal.  …

What will the Cloud do?

I was pointed at the Eucalyptus project, an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters, by a colleague and decided I needed to check out Amazon first. Several colleagues have given me this advice but have the University really written an open source grid platform conforming to Amazon’s EC2 APIs. if so, it’s a fascinating example of the speed of commoditisation. …

Billing for Clouds

When considering the some of the issues related to building private clouds, the “Usage to Billing” problem was raised and I was reminded of Emlyn Pagden’s Blueprint, “The Utility Model PII” 2003. I had been consulting with a mid sized European Investment Bank, and discussed the architectural problem with them, and Emlyn. Its a while since I have read Emlyn’s paper, but he took the architectural decomposition,  …