Category Archives: Technical

Amazon Elastic MapReduce – The power of the Grid and the elasticity of the Cloud

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Amazon has recently introduced its Elastic MapReduce service. With it users will have the power of the Grid Computing together with the elasticity of the Cloud Computing paradigm. Having access to computing power able to perform data-intensive tasks like financial analysis, scientific simulation, etc , will no longer be dependent of a pre-tagged price. You only need to pay when you are using the service. This seems to be a very interesting service, and as Sam Johnston says, a very interesting development in the “Cloud as an operating environment”.

Cloud Gaming, would it be possible? – I believe it will!

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In a recent post, JC Fletcher talks about the service promoted by onlive.com gaming platform. In this post he talks about some subjects on which the Cloud Gaming could have problems, namely the video encoding process and the latency on communications. In previous posts I already have talked about some of these questions and also about the projects developed by AMD on this field, but the information provided by the JC’s post will help introduce some new thoughts on this matter.
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Cloud Gaming – would it be possible?

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AMD is working on this apparently impossible thing called Cloud-Gaming, and it has introduced some nice thoughts and concepts in its Render Fusion. I already had the opportunity to talk about it in a previous posts. But now we have a more “real” intention or promise, Onlive.com is advertising a service that would deploy gaming directly from the Cloud as a service. Apparently they have solved all the questions about latency, video compression, etc. The service  will be open very soon, but for now you can read more about their promises here:

http://kotaku.com/5181300/onlive-makes-pc-upgrades-extinct-lets-you-play-crysis-on-your-tv

I will stay tunned to watch this “revolution”…

AMD Render Fusion – moving from the meta information paradigm to a pixel information paradigm?

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In his blog, Simon Solotko, talks about how Render Fusion could change the way the Cloud and the clients  interact. His vision is very futuristic, and it contains a little “Blade Runner” like thoughts, but I think that we need this kind of vision.  As a summary of his vision I have selected the following part of his text.

“Rendering in the Cloud can solve the bandwidth problem by capping the bandwidth problem. All I need to do is refresh a screen with data at a particular resolution appropriate to the client’s screen and available bandwidth. No additional bandwidth needed between the client and the server, ever – only three variables, screen size, interface visual integrity, and upstream user input. Peak bandwidth requirements become fixed and predictable.”
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Dark clouds in the sky Tuesday morning – Gmail outage

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Apparently the Gmail outage was due to a problem in their code.  Accordingly to  Gmail official blog,  the code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner, was unable to deal with a routine maintenance in one of  Google European datacenters.

We easily accept that this kind of code can be very complex, and also, that could be very difficult to track its bugs.  Nevertheless, I think that problems like this one, and also the one that occurred  last month, can  be damaging to the Cloud’s reputation. So, it’s important that Cloud techs work hard to reduced these situations as  much as possible.

We must also continue the work in technologies like Gears or HTML5. If I had activated the off-line support on Gmail, released by Google last month,  I would’ve been able to continue accessing my emails. Consequently, problems like this one wouldn’t be so important.