Author: Dr Will Venters

Lecturer in Information Systems, Department of Management, London School of Economics.

Green Computing and the Cloud – SETI@home

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

Cloud computing hides the environmental impact of computing from the user. When we search using Google our own PC doesn’t suddenly start to cough – the fan doesn’t ramp up, our laptop doesn’t burn through the table. But somewhere in Google processors are using energy to undertake the search. Google is aware of this and tries hard to reduce this cost and its environmental impact.

There is a corollary of this though. When we use peer-to-peer software our processor uses more power and more electricity but we seldom notice. While perhaps tiny in aggregate this can be significant. And unlike Google few of us think about it, or try to use renewable energy to reduce its CO2 emissions.

Let me demonstrate with a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation.

SETI@home (the peer-to-peer application searching for ET) has 5.2 million participants and has produced an aggregate two million years of computing time. Taking an example of power usage for basic computers we can see that the difference between an idle computer and a in-use computer (i.e. where SETI is doing its processing) would be around 20watts ( though perhaps more). Given SETI has run for 17,520,000,000 hours that works out at about 350,400 Megawatt hours or 350.4 Gigawatt hours.

The UK average consumption of Gas and Electricity is about 22,338kWh per household (in 2007).  In the ten years since it started SETI@home has used about as much energy as a town of about 15,000 people would use in Gas and Electricity in an entire year!

Interestingly assuming US consumer energy costs (since most will be in homes in the US) at about 8c per kw/h this is about $28million of electricity! The key points is that this is only about 50c per year per participant – scarcely enough to make them change their SETI screensaver, but highly significant in the aggregate.

And SETI@home has yet to discover anything alien!

G-Cloud – A talk by John Suffolk (hosted by Computer Weekly)

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I attended a talk by the UK Government’s CIO – John Suffolk ( See here for more information on his role). At the talk John outlined his idea for a “G-Cloud” (government cloud) with the primary aim of reducing IT costs within government. Central government has around 130 datacenters, and an estimated 9000 server rooms, with local government and quasi-government obviously adding to this figure. Reducing and consolidating these through Cloud Computing would offer significant efficiencies and cost saving. Indeed given that 5% of contract costs are simply for bidding/procurement by simply having less procurement of resources costs would automatically be saved.

John outlined different “cloud-worlds” which he sees as important opportunities for cost saving through cloud computing in government.

1) “The testing world” – by using cloud computing to provide test-kits and environments it is possible to reduce the huge number of essentially idle servers kept simply for testing. For such servers utilisation is estimated at 7%.

2) “The shared world” – Many of the services offered by government require the same standardised and shared services. While these must be hosted internally they offer savings by using Cloud ideas. http://www.direct.gov for example has two data-centres at present – but could these also be used for similar services in other areas?

3) “Web Services world” – This was more unclear in the talk  but centred around the exploitation of cloud offerings through web services. For example could an “App-Store” be developed to aid government in simple procurement of tested and assured services. Could such an App-Store provide opportunities for SMEs to provide software into government through easier procurement processes (which currently preclude many SMEs from trying).

This idea of an App-store is  interesting. It would essentially provide a wrapper around an application to make transparent across government the pricing of an application, the contracting-vehicle required to purchase, the security level it is assured for use with, and details of who in government is using it. Finally deployment tools would be included to allow applications to be rolled out simply.

John acknowledged that many details need ironing out, particularly issues of European procurement rules (and the UKs obsession with following them to the letter of the law).  While government might like to pay-per-use and contract at crown level (so licences can be moved from department to department rather than creating new purchases) this would be a change in the way software is sold and might affect R&D, licence issues, maintenance etc.

The App-Store would be a means to crack the problem of procurement and the time it takes. and so drive costs down for both sides.

What was clear however was the desire to use the cloud for the lower level application stack. To “Disintermediate applications” because “we don’t care about underlying back-end, only care about the software service” – Government can use a common bottom of the stack.

Indeed it was discussed that a standard design for a government desktop-PC might be an “application” within the app-store so centralising this design and saving the huge costs of individual design per department (see http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/317444/ict_strategy4.pdf#page=23 for more details).

Finally the cloud offers government the same opportunities to scale operations to meet demand (for example MyGov pages when new announcements are made, or Treasury when the budget is announced), however this scalable-service would also affect costs and might not be justified in the budgeting.  While we look at the cloud to stop web-sites going down there is also a cost to providing such scalable support for the few days a year it is needed – cloud or no cloud.

Thank you to Computer Weekly for inviting me to this event!

Google Sidewiki – Not available on Chrome

Dr Will Venters2 Comments

It is interesting that GOOGLE is trying to dominate in so many markets but seems not to be joined up (see Googled by Ken Auletta –http://www.amazon.com/Googled-End-World-As-Know/dp/1594202354). Its Chrome browser has been launched to try to wrestle control of the browser from IE (and FireFox) and provide usage data back to the Google corpus. Huge amounts were clearly spent on advertising in the UK – yet those developing it failed to include the very features Google have added to IE and Firefox – namely the toolbar. Having switched to Chrome I am left with even less Google-developed features than before. (e.g. try Google Sidewiki on Chrome).

Why is this important for the Cloud? Because the browser is the key access mechanism for Cloud services (particularly SaaS) and Google aims to be a key player in both providing the browser and providing the Cloud services. If its browser is problematic then its offering might be suspect.

Web Services and Cloud

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

I am currently in Korea at a Joint UK/Korean eScience workshop. One of the questions raised was that Web Services is a requisite for cloud – a precursor to the ability to move data-analysis jobs into the cloud. Similarly this rests on whether a problem can be effectively parallelised on CPUs with poor interconnects (since the networks in Cloud Providers are not the same as in a supercomputer). Unlike Grid or Clusters undertaking collaborative analysis using nodes on a cloud provider will require a more detailed understanding of the network infrastructure (and the virtual-machine distribution) of servers on the network.  This network issue should form part of the SLA when cloud services are commissioned.

One Big Namespace

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

One of the issues which seems to be missing from the debate is the nature of addressing. A key benefit of Grid and High-performance computing is the idea of global addressing of files and this seems a major drive forward for Cloud. Imagine if files are not locked to a server (i.e by a URL where the first part is a server – http://www.bbc.co.uk for example), but instead can reside anywhere and be addressed easily from anywhere. Why is this important? Because files live longer than the servers they reside on, and may not remain in the same place/country.

Publications on Cloud Computing research papers collection | Mendeley

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

Various Publications on Cloud Computing research papers collection | Mendeley.

Defogging the Cloud: Applying Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing

David A. Couillard

The Economic Impact of Cloud Computing on Business Creation,Employment and Output in Europe

Federico Etro

A Break in the Clouds: Towards a Cloud Definition

Luis M. Vaquero1, Luis Rodero-Merino1 , Juan Caceres1, Maik Lindner2

  • This paper provides a useful table of definitions of Cloud from the literature (page 52), and most usefully a table comparing Grid and Cloud.

Haibo Yang, Mary Tate(2009) Where are we at with Cloud Computing?: A Descriptive Literature Review 20th Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2-4 Dec 2009, Melbourne

  • As a descriptive review of the literature on Cloud Computing within Information Systems this paper is necessarily limited. Little research has been done and hence the conclusions cannot be strong. That said it is a very useful piece with lots of material and a systematic analysis.

Relevant SaaS literature

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

Posted on the AIS World list; I have not reviewed them yet:

A Transaction Cost Perspective of the “Software as a Service” Business Model. By: Susarla, Anjana; Barua, Anitesh; Whinston, Andrew B.. Journal of Management Information Systems, Fall2009, Vol. 26 Issue 2, p205-240

Campbell-Kelly, M. “Historical Reflections The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Software as a Service,” Communications of the ACM (52:5) 2009, pp 28-30.

Choudhary, V. “Comparison of Software Quality Under Perpetual Licensing and Software as a Service,” Journal of Management Information Systems (24:2), Fall 2007, pp 141-165.