Kevin Kelly in his talk on TED.com talks about the future of web (Next 5000 days of the web) as a web-mesh that will integrate everything on the planet earth. He also gives a passing reference to the “cloud book”. I personally have been interested in the concept of “The Cloud”.
Laptops and PCs of the future will not need to have a memory storage capability. The concept of “Cloud Book” revolves around the hand held device that will be required to fetch and display the required information from the “cloud”.
To work for this cloud, there needs to be a continuous cloud in which the information flows. The cloud is supported by the Grid. The billions of terabytes of the information will be stored on different servers in the Grid, the processing power will be a sum total of all the processors connected to the grid and the flow will be seamless.
This idea might look very farfetched today, but in some years to come, it will be reality. Many companies have going in this direction Flicker, e-snips, Blogs, Wikis; Social CRM etc. have already started taking the first steps in this direction. All these applications work on the principle of “Storing and Sharing”. On similar lines, the vast sea of knowledge will be stored and shared with the millions of users connected to the grid. All one needs is a device to connect to the cloud and fetch the information required.
Now, this Cloud Book will have to be a standard platform, which has some processing capability. Once it’s up and running, the Book will make use of the Cloud and select the best Operating System required for doing the task at that moment. If more processing capability is required to achieve the task, it will make use of the spare processing capability of other machines connected to the Grid.
Thus, the information in this world just becomes a sea where one just needs a bucket to take whatever he wants. The best part is, whatever information the person takes, is not depleted from the sea. On the other hand, when the user converts this information into knowledge, it is added to the Cloud so that others can also use the same.
I am eagerly waiting for this concept to get up and running. May be this is the Next Big Thing on the net.
I think we all have significant exposure to cloud computing .I am curious to see how Grid computing pans out and whether it is scalable to be game changer . Guess we will have to wait few years .