final thought
UP AND UP
Darren Watkins of Virtus Data Centres considers whether
the end of Moore’s law could unleash a new wave of creativity.
I
’m not sure that there is anyone
in the world who wants less
power or lower performance
from their technology. And
it’s fair to say that higher
performance is driven by what goes
on in the processer. With Moore’s law
coming to a plateau, the IT industry
is going to have to work hard to
try and maintain the momentum it
has brought over the last 40 years.
Technology has got smaller, yet more
powerful and today’s smartphones
can do more than many of the supercomputers of old.
Software programmers can
no longer rely on increases in raw
processing power. They will need
to look to use processing resources
more efficiently and drawing on vast
numbers of crunching resources in
the cloud is one of the main ways
computing can continue to move
forward. By sharing computer
capacity, processing capability
improves which enables businesses to
be more effective and innovate.
Shared resource
I am old enough to remember
SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence) when it was big in
the 90s. It was software that you
could download so when you were
50
offline your computer capacity could
be shared with systems around
the world and mine massive data
to search the universe for extraterrestrial intelligence. This is one of
the first examples of cloud – using
shared resource.
The principle is the same for
public cloud today. Rather than
having 20 owned computers in a data
centre, by connecting to a multitude
of other systems through the cloud,
people can share the benefit of
combined processing power.
So how does this relate to
Moore’s law? The cloud has to live
somewhere and the data centre is
its home.
Cloud has been one of the most
talked about subjects in the tech
industry for over 10 years, and
it has taken that long to become
mainstream. But now it is, the take
up is meteoric. For a long time, there
was an oversupply of data centre
space in the market, but the demand
for cloud has boosted the demand
for data centre space, space that
will quickly be consumed if data
providers don’t continue to build.
Today, capacity needs have increased
exponentially and companies don’t
buy what they used to a few years
ago when the average take up
was a couple of hundred kW. Now
businesses are buying multiple
megawatts in one go. And there
aren’t many data centre providers
who can deliver that kind of space.
Moore’s law is about the doubling
of processing power every two
years. If you look at the consumption
of cloud to satisfy the future of
computing, Moore’s law still applies at
the data centre level. If we think of a
data centre as a silicon chip (because