IT IS ENGLISH BLOG

Computing Cloud

Cloud Computing

Internet Cloud

The Cloud is the name that is given to the amorphous entity of binary digits, not rain drops, that hovers in the global atmosphere, that our economies and social interactions are increasingly dependent on, and that touches down from time to time to earth at industrial sized server farms that are starting to pose a threat to the global climate.

This week the Economist has both a full article and a leader on the subject of the energy guzzling Computing Cloud: Down on the Server Farm These global entities are run by large internet companies in huge warehouses, some as big as several football pitches. “These data centres are filled with thousands of powerful computers and storage devices and are hooked up to the internet via fast fibre-optic links.” The article refers to the place “where the cloud touches down”. The servers on these farms are so numerous and powerful that as much power may be required for cooling the computers as for the actual data crunching. It concludes: ‘In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. “Virtualisation” technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere.’ For the Economist Leader on the topic see: Buy our stuff, save the planet

Wikipedia tells us that the term “cloud computing” “derives from the common depiction in most technology architecture diagrams, of the Internet or IP availability, using an illustration of a cloud”. “The architecture behind cloud computing is a massive network of “cloud servers” interconnected as if in a grid running in parallel, sometimes using the technique of virtualization to maximize the utilization of the computing power available per server.” It states that it is not the same as the business model of “Software as a Service”.

Alex Barnett in his blog gives some rather more people friendly explanations, as for instance the tentative, “maybe it’s more like one giant thought-bubble in the sky?”, along with pretty pictures and some interesting links.

One of these links leads to an article called The Internet Cloud by Jessie Holliday Scanlon and Brad Wieners from Wired magazine. They use wonderful phrases like “the great cloud of unknowing has many disciples” and they discuss the reasons for the cloud being the main icon for representing the net, seemingly because it hides a lack of understanding about, or ability to explain, the inner workings, and it has no clear boundaries: ‘We always drew networks as amoeba-like things because they had no fixed topology and typically covered varying geographic areas,” says Vint Cerf, cocreator of TCP/IP, the language of networked computers. In short, no one needs to know the exact route their data will take to get from point to point. Everything is fine as long as it comes out of the cloud at the correct address.’

Creative Conclusion:
The Cloud is a giant thought bubble in the sky, with more thoughts even than Dilbert.
The Cloud is a vast grid of server farms that are themselves vast collections of data centres.
The Cloud is Software as a Service on the net as well as Software that is not a Service on the net.
The Cloud is trillions of millions of billions of bits zooming around like an infinite swarm of bees in the great bit dump in the sky.
The Cloud is like a traditional cloud – it has an impact on the environment. It may serve us well, with gentle rain, or it may cause a deluge that may drown us all.
The Cloud is the internet energy guzzler that far from being a green technology may cause climate change by the vast amounts of power it consumes.

My mind Clouds over and I ask these Questions:
Does Humanity have its head in the Clouds?
Is this the new the Cloud on the Horizon?

ETYM

Traditional Cloud (water vapor)
Mushroom Cloud (nuclear explosions)
Electron Cloud (the atom)
Information Cloud, Info Cloud (mobile communications)
Tag Cloud (social software)

As the the Rolling Stones sang way back in the sixties:
“Hey! You! Get off of my cloud.”

Apologies for absence – I’ve been off on my own cloud!

The Code of Life has now spawned the BarCode of Life.

DNA Barcoding is a way of identifying an organism as belonging to a particular species, based on its mitochondrial DNA. Often a small section of a gene called the COI is used. Wikipedia describes its use in the identification of birds and flowering plants and the controversy that it has created amongst scientists. Some scientists “resent what they see as a gross oversimplification of the science of taxonomy”.

This week the Economist has an article entitled Taxonomy in which they tell us that “Biologists want to barcode half a million species in the next five years”. We are told that “DNA barcoding was invented by Paul Herbert” who wanted “to generate a unique identification tag for each species based on a short stretch of DNA”. The Economist uses both the noun forms (“DNA barcoding“, “DNA barcode“), and the verb forms (“to barcode“, “have barcoded“), as well as new compounds based on the DNA part being understood or assumed (“bird barcoding“, “barcode factories“).

The prestigious scientific journal “Nature”, that originally published the seminal article by Watson and Crick in 1953, tells us, intriguingly, that “DNA barcoding is no substitute for taxonomy”. (Try typing that into Google.) I say intriguingly as I cannot read any more of this article as it is hidden behind a gateway to knowledge that only “special people” have access to. (Nature has provided an open link for us all to read a contribution to the “Open Access Debate”.) Perhaps some readers of this blog will be electronicially enabled to read about the subtleties in the DNA Barcoding / Taxonomy debate and possibly even fill us in a bit about the implications of Cyber-taxonomy or Digital-taxonomy.

I associate BarCodes with Supermarkets. I wonder how long it will be until we can buy a Species Specimen and check it out at the DNA Barcoding machine. Already Barcoding is being used in the identification of flowering plants. How long until the local garden centre does a “DNA Swipe” on your geraniums?

ETYM

DNA – Deoxyribonucleic Acid

From “Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” or “D.N.A.” as Watson and Crick described it in their article in Nature on April 25th 1953.

Deoxyribose refers to the fact that oxygen has been removed from the ribose sugar part of the molecule.

Wikipedia will enlighten any readers who would like to get to know others of the family of DNA related words – DNA supercoiling, DNA polymerase, DNA replication, DNA ligase, to name just a few of the compounds that this three letter acronym has spawned.

DNA is commonly known as the Double Helix of Life.

Barcode

Wikipedia tells us that it is a “machine-readable representation of information”.

As it is often represented by dark lines on a light background the code is turned into visible bars, hence BarCode.

This ancient and quietly important word seems to have achieved a new blaze of publicity due to the noisy financial earthquake that has recently circled the globe, partly in the electronic wires and wireless spaces that are the digital highways, partly in the minds of the people who decide whether to trust the numbers on their computer screens, all in the no-man’s land that could be called the global trading space.

A highly educated friend of mine recently revealed to me that she did not know the meaning of the word Algorithm. I was rather shocked because normally this friend would know the meaning of a word and I might not. This made me wonder how I know the word but I felt that I had always known it. Maybe it goes back to the days of school maths.

Wikipedia gives a full description of the term including its history and its various classifications. Having read the Wikipedia entry I now believe that I never did understand the meaning of the word after all. I had the simple idea that it referred to a number of steps that in some way or other represented a formula along a timeline. Not being a mathematician it was a term that I only ever had to understand in a vague sense.

That vague sort of understanding of Algorithm will I think become more common. The term has gone mainstream. It is no longer confined to hallowed mathematical spaces. It has escaped into the real world in a very big computer assisted fashion, and this week as the financial crisis that we are told originated in America has hit the British high street the spotlight is on the rogue algorithms that may have played some role in this vast computer game that seems to me to be what they call money.

This week Algorithms feature strongly in the Economist, which has an article simply entitled Algorithms, with the subtitle “Business by numbers”. We are given a nice easy description from the head of Microsoft Research in Cambridge – “A computer program is a written encoding of an algorithm“. In fact computers feature widely in this article. We are told, for instance, that algorithms that control different aspects of the internet do not always communicate with each other. In another article in the same issue we are told that ants could help us to design better Algorithms. In yet another article we read about “computer generated ‘algorithmic trading‘ programs”, which in some big exchanges are responsible for about a third of the trading.

In “Algorithmic Trading: the use of algorithims in automated trading” John Bates writes “In the algorithmic trading space, an “algorithm” describes a sequence of steps by which patterns in real-time market data can be recognized and responded to in order to detect trading opportunities and place and manage orders in the market.”

Algorithmic Trading, Wikipedia tells us, is also known as “algo, automated, black-box, or robo trading“. These terms are interesting give-aways. A “black-box” normally refers to something that we don’t understand the workings of. “Robo” I assume refers to “robotic“, although I like to think that it might have a hint of “robber” in it. After all, where did all the missing money go?

ETYM

It originated from the term Algorism, which was derived from the name of a medieval Persian mathematician, al-Khwārizmī, “the father of Algebra“.

See the Online Etymology Dictionary