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

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.

By: DaveZatz

DaveZatz — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 03:41:12 +0000

For me, personal cloud computing is more like running WHS at home that I can access from anywhere. And new hooks into MCE coming tomorrow.

By: Levi

Levi — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:59:55 +0000

Yup. You got it. I got my company to put a 4 core, 8GB RAM “powerhouse” placed in their server room for my statistics work. I RDC into it wherever I am (office, home, on the run). Initially I was gonna just run it from home to minimize my dealings with the IT department (though they turned out to be better then expected).

Right now I am migrating off my MBP and on to my Dell Mini 9 with OSX. A couple additional weeks of test time (while my internal SSD upgrade arrives) and I am putting the big monsterbook pro on the market. Stats (and a file server) can run on the big machine. The netbook can handle email, browsing, word processing and connecting to the server.

Though pay as you go service is an interesting idea. I wonder how much horsepower are we looking at. If it gets my high CPU jobs done significantly quicker then what I currently have I might be interested.

By: awam

awam — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:08:52 +0000

What I do is run TightVNC server on my quad-core desktop and remote desktop into it from my notebook.

It works really well and is great for photoshop/encoding.

I even do most of my web browsing through it, the browser just runs faster.

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:24:33 +0000

Ack! You don’t “get me” because I misunderstood your comment. You wrote “People who use netbooks aren’t generally consumers let alone producers of HD content”. I took that as “people who use netbooks aren’t consumers *NOR* are they producers of HD content”. Sorry, my bad!

By: CSMR

CSMR — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:14:59 +0000

I don’t follow you. Geeks are not the target audience audience for netbooks, which cater to the low end of the market. And people who use servers or even understand what a server is are geeks.
Making high-performance servers available to the average geek (who in general does not use a netbook) certainly has its uses, but the most important uses will be things that are too hard for a quad-core laptop with discrete GPU. E.g. scientific computing. (There are uses of servers/the cloud beyond computing power but this is the use being discussed here.)

By: Scotty

Scotty — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:43:34 +0000

They already have a prepared image for your video conversion project: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=686&categoryID=202

Since they charge for bandwidth too that image must put a smile on the cash register when they build it out.

If I were doing a startup today I’d buy into Google Apps Premier and use the AWS for the PBX with some SIP trunking for the phone numbers. With the money saved on servers/racks/etc I could buy everyone Sony Vaio P’s for “desktops”/”desk phones” and they could work from practically anywhere.

So I don’t know about personal cloud but I certainly see this as the future of small to medium business IT.

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:17:50 +0000

Hmmm… that means there are around 20m “geeks” out there who are the only netbook owners. And none of them are consumers. See my comments above: the HD content example was simply that: an example.