Internet specialists see 'clouds' gathering

Chicago Tribune (MCT) - Making use of all the knowledge online is a huge challenge that may be solved by cloud computing, which researchers say is the next logical step for the Internet.

Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are working with colleagues at Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo, as well as researchers in Europe and Asia, to build a global test bed for exploring system designs for the future.

Cloud computing involves supplying applications over the Internet rather than loading them on an individual user's computer. An example is a word processing program supplied by Google that lets users compose documents without the program on their computers.

Within six years, this process will expand so that corporations will rely less on on-site information technology infrastructure and more on applications supplied online by the "cloud," said Barry Lynn, chief of 3Tera, a California-based software company.

"Companies spend billions on information technology, which isn't their core competency, because they've had no choice," Lynn said. "That's changing."

Cloud computing will go beyond replacing corporate data centers, said Michael Heath, an Illinois computer scientist who is among the leaders building the global cloud test bed.

"We're talking about more than using applications remotely," Heath said. "You won't even have to know about applications or where things happen or what happens. You'll just ask a question and the computer will supply the answer.

"You take the Internet to the next level, where it doesn't just cough up pre-stored data but it creates new knowledge by extracting new information from data."

The term cloud computing was chosen as a metaphor for fuzziness, Heath said, "because with clouds you're never sure where the boundaries are."

Linking thousands of computers to enhance their speed and power is the key to this project. It is an area where Illinois researchers have long excelled, dating to the 1960s, when they built Illiac IV, a system that tied many processors together to work in parallel.

To create a cloud computing system on an Internet scale will raise problems of allocating work with optimal efficiency among various processors, which researchers will explore on the global test bed once it is operating later this year.

"We're focused on a large amount of data and a great deal of processing power," Heath said. "For example, the computer must not merely do a symbolic search of a document, it must understand the English semantics of the document and do analysis."

___

© 2008, Chicago Tribune.