Government Technology - June 2008 - (Page 19)

nected machines on standby mode when unused. Folding@home co-ops the machines’ collective computing muscle to help solve the genetic riddles that plague efforts to cure diseases. Utility computing is similar in some ways and dissimilar in others. In the utility computing model, rather than randomly dispersed machines working on a single problem, randomly dispersed people access computer farms to solve their own problems. It’s called utility computing because it operates like an everyday utility, such as electricity, gas, water, etc. Regardless of the exact strategy or definition in play, it all comes down to the cloud concept, which is the transformation of infrastructure to software. The machines themselves become less about performing a task and more about accessing computational power. If there was ever a philosophical goal underlying the creation of the Internet, cloud computing may be it — an infinite number of machines using an infinite number of resources to perform a task. As the Information Age rushes onward, more data is continually created. IT professionals in the public sector routinely confront the challenges associated with maintaining this data onslaught. What if, instead of routinely investing in new infrastructure, an agency could instead access a global cloud of machines to process data? Google and other industry heavyweights are already preparing for the cloud-computing era. Like Microsoft and IBM, Google has tens of thousands of machines that sit around the world. Accessing these machines’ unused computing power would be like tapping into to an enormous supercomputer capable of crunching the biggest numbers. Christophe Bisciglia, a Google software engineer, recently launched the Academic Cluster Computing Initiative. Through a partnership with IBM and the National Science Foundation, Bisciglia connects universities worldwide to Google’s cloud, and along the way teaches students to think and program on a massive scale. “We started with the University of Washington, and we brought in a cluster of 40 machines, and we taught the first cluster-computing course for undergraduates,” Bisciglia explained. “We used an open-source software system called Hadoop. It’s an open-source distributed computing platform inspired by Google’s published computing technology. It’s a software system that gives you the ability to turn a cluster of hardware into a dynamic software system that allows you to manage and process large amounts of data.” What’s the use of clusters? As Bisciglia explained, organizations are being inundated relationship management (CRM) solutions for organizations that can’t or won’t invest in the infrastructure to do it themselves. The company is now heavily involved in applications that extend beyond CRM, opening its cloud to anyone who wants access. Salesforce.com also offers users a platform service that lets them create their own unique applications in the cloud — and users If you’ve just ﬁnished dinner on a Microsoft Surface table, you can pay your bill, map your way to the theater, and buy tickets just by placing your ﬁngers (and credit card) on the screen. with more and more data. Single machines become incapable of processing these vast amounts of information and eventually will fail. Buying more machines becomes unfeasible — particularly for public-sector organizations limited by budgets. “Networks are getting faster and faster. Two computers connected to each other via network are much more like a dual processor machine than they were five years ago,” said Bisciglia. “So basically you need to scale out horizontally now. When you want more computational power, you can’t just wait for computers to get faster; you can’t just buy a faster processor. You need to add more computers in a network’s configuration and interact with another cluster, rather than as a single machine.” Cloud computing isn’t as far off as it might initially seem. In fact, it’s already happening in some respects, but it goes by yet another name: software-as-a-service (SaaS). SaaS has been around in one form (application service provider, or ASP) or another for a while. It functions via the same principles as cloud computing. Instead of users investing in more computing infrastructure to complete tasks, they can instead access someone else’s cloud to do the work. Salesforce.com has been a leader in the SaaS industry for years by hosting customer can keep the applications for themselves or share them with others. “Platform user service really allows customers to have computing power delivered completely as a utility in the cloud,” said Dan Burton, senior vice president of global public policy for Salesforce.com, “so customers can then use the cloud computing architecture to build, test, deploy and run applications in the cloud. What that really means for customers and developers is, instead of going to a preconfigured application, they can really go into the cloud, and using our programming language, APEX, they can custom build any application they want to.” It may not be the stuff that cloud computing dreams are made of, but it represents the inroads that are being made into cloud computing, which are available to an IT crowd desperate to produce more with less. One obstacle to life in the clouds is security. Public-sector organizations trade heavily in sensitive data; the thought of letting that data loose in some ethereal cluster of random machines is likely to send shivers up CIOs’ spines. It makes sense that early cloud activity takes place in an environment mediated by a large, established company like Salesforce.com, which is why several public-sector organizations 19 http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - June 2008

Government Technology - June 2008 Contents Point of View The Last Mile Big Picture On the Scene Four Questions For... 3 Technologies That May Change Your Job ...And Your Life Loosening Medicaid's Grip Better Living Through Technology Immersive Itineraries Help Yourself Taking the Bait Shared Connection Up Close Spectrum Products Personal Computing signal:noise Digital Communities Contents Digital Tactics for a U.S. Recession E-Dilemma Stifling Community Innovation Leadership Interview Estonia Becomes E-Stonia If It Were Up to Me …

Government Technology - June 2008

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