Serching technical info on cloud computing

satimis · #1 March 7th, 2009, 10:08

Hi folks,

Cloud computing is now becoming the hot cake. I heard cloud computing, the noisy, sometimes but no successful story discovered.

I have been googling couple hours to find its technology, particularly in Open Source, how to implement it. Most the articles found in my searching were only information describing its advantage and its future trend. No indepth technology was found. Can any folk shed me some light on;

- platform to be used
- tools to be used
- how to build it
- is it possible to test it on server at home
etc.

TIA

B.R.
satims

roddierod · #2 March 7th, 2009, 12:25

I'm old and feisty so people well probably say there is more to it and it the greatest thing since air, but all it is is mainframe, client server technology over the internet.

But instead of having the big steel to help protect you, you have lots of script kiddies and disgruntled employees trying to crack your data...

fbsduser · #3 March 8th, 2009, 00:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by roddierod

I'm old and feisty so people well probably say there is more to it and it the greatest thing since air, but all it is is mainframe, client server technology over the internet.

But instead of having the big steel to help protect you, you have lots of script kiddies and disgruntled employees trying to crack your data...

This cloud computing thing is (at least the one M$ wants to impose on us) even bigger than the mainframe/dumb terminal affair from your golden days. M$ is secretly planning to make a new "on the cloud/diskless" computing platform that will have two components. The computers themselves are custom made non-x86 compatible diskless boxes (by diskless I mean it, no HD, no floppy, no optical drive, no WLAN and the USB/FW/LAN chipsets have been modded so that you can't boot off anyone of them and so you can't rewire the netboot to your own hidden "old-school" PC) which will carry midori (an in-development lightweight OS whose sole function will be to POST/BOOT/start up the NIC) in ROM (read: old-school non-flashable read-only memory) and will be hardwired to boot off midori and automatically connect to the M$ servers where the applications you use and data you produce in these applications (note that I don't refer to them by your apps or your data, this is intentional since the apps and data stored there are not yours, are property of M$) reside. The twist in this is that they'll offer this for free (both equipment and access to the cloud-apps) to "unprivileged" schools and institutions in 3rd-party countries and when they're happy about it, M$ will "expand" this to enterprises (equipment cheap/access free), then when all the corporate world is into this, home users are likelly gonna take the bait and get into this "cloud computing", and finally when all but us BSD/Linux/Mac users are left in the "old-school" PC's. They're gonna do all sort of their dirty tricks to fool the gov into thinking that some cybercriminal/cracker/terrorist group is using "old-school" computers to try and take down the M$ "cloud computing platform" so that the gov pass a bill making it illegal to make/own/use "old-school (a.k.a: normal desktop/laptop/netbooks)" computers, which the gov is likelly to do. The moment this happens M$ will starting charging subscription fees for access to the cloud-apps/data and raise the prices of the equipment, they'll also start aggresivelly monitoring/censoring data (read: the apps will refuse to save if M$ instruct them to do so, data previously present will just vanish, or become modified without your knowledge/consent, and new data you never produced might appear "out of thin air") all in the name of "capturing the cybercriminals (just like bush used the "war-on-terror" as a smoke screen to invade whichever country he so wished, and monitor/censor anyone he desired)". In fact this is not new. They have launched already several trial-ballons for this stuff. The XP activation/WGA, the Xbox (their first aptempt at making a computer), their "live" services (to see how people adapt to having apps and data "online"), skydrive (they wanted to see how well people get used to replacing thier physical HD's with "BIG" cloud-based storage), minwin (they wanted to see how small they could get a kernel, and if it would be fittable in ROM), midori (this will be the core of this stuff) among others. Most of this trial-ballons have proven succesful, which means that perhaps we might be nearing a terrible end, that is unless either linux or BSD (OSX doesn't count b/c the price of apple's hardware is a major showstopper for them) get's as likable (they're already usable and friendly, but there's something more that needs to be done to get people switching in BIG numbers) as windoze so that we get at least 70% on our side b4 they even have time to actually launch that thing. If we miss it, is likelly they'll win this one and royally screw us bad (how you run BSD, if the thing won't allow you to boot it off anything but it's ROM).

estrabd · #4 March 8th, 2009, 14:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by satimis

Hi folks,

Cloud computing is now becoming the hot cake. I heard cloud computing, the noisy, sometimes but no successful story discovered.

I have been googling couple hours to find its technology, particularly in Open Source, how to implement it. Most the articles found in my searching were only information describing its advantage and its future trend. No indepth technology was found. Can any folk shed me some light on;

- platform to be used
- tools to be used
- how to build it
- is it possible to test it on server at home
etc.

TIA

B.R.
satims

You can't find anything because there is nothing. "Utility" computing begat "Grid" computing when it failed commercially and academia picked it up. "Cloud" computing is the new commercial version of "Grid" computing, which is just about the worst kind of damnation out there. Do yourself a favor - learn the original foundation for so called cloud computing - /bin/sh and ssh, and don't buy into the hype.

Put another way, "cloud" computing is the new AI.

Other ways to get a good grasp on the fundamentals - don't focus on tools or buzz words. Focus on parallel programming models suitable for massively distributed (unshared) memory spaces. Look at things like MPI and BOINC. Heck, you can even get into Erlang. In fact, I highly recommend you do this.

Cheers

satimis · #5 March 8th, 2009, 15:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by estrabd

You can't find anything because there is nothing. "Utility" computing begat "Grid" computing when it failed commercially and academia picked it up. "Cloud" computing is the new commercial version of "Grid" computing, which is just about the worst kind of damnation out there. Do yourself a favor - learn the original foundation for so called cloud computing - /bin/sh and ssh, and don't buy into the hype.

Put another way, "cloud" computing is the new AI.

Hi estrabd,

Thanks for your advice.

I heard cloud computing at least 3~4 years ago when I tested grid computing. Some people described a beautiful picture that in future users use software just like paying electricity bill. If they don't use it no need to pay a cent. At that time I already have a doubt. If each customer wants to configure the software to his own way how can the service provider satisfy their need. We can setup virtual host on mail server and virtual hosting on webserver. But virtual software was/is unknown to me.

I tested grid computing before, running globus toolkit from IBM (if I remember it correctly). There was another grid engine developed by Sun, also Open Source. Finally I ceased testing it. Because the websites for testing grid computing were either NOT working OR discontinued. All of them were supported by universities.

last week I attended a conference. Cloud computing was in the agenda. The speaker delivered the same speech that I heard 4 year ago. As curiosity I spent several hours googling around about the latest development on cloud computing. Unfortunately I found none. That is the complete story.

Quote:

Other ways to get a good grasp on the fundamentals - don't focus on tools or buzz words. Focus on parallel programming models suitable for massively distributed (unshared) memory spaces. Look at things like MPI and BOINC. Heck, you can even get into Erlang. In fact, I highly recommend you do this.

I found follows via googling. Whether they are relevant to your suggestion?

BOINC
====

BOINC
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

BOINC - Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
http://wiki.debian.org/BOINC

BOINC FAQ
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~embersp/boincfaq.html

BOINC
Installing BOINC
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BOINC

ERLANG
=====
erlang b
erlang c
erlang calculator
erlang distribution
erlang excel
erlang table
erlang tutorial
erlang unit

Erlang, Open-source
http://erlang.org/about.html

Erlang (programming language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_...mming_language)

MPI
==
Message Passing Interface
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface

Parallel Computing
===========
Introduction to Parallel Computing
https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/parallel_comp/

Parallel programming model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_programming_model
http://barossa.ac3.edu.au/edu/hpc-intro/node10.html

B.R.
satimis

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The Following User Says Thank You to roddierod For This Useful Post:
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