FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES Lecture 13

 In this lecture we will discuss some of the important technologies of the future  Autonomic Computing  Cloud Computing  Grid Computing  Quantum Computing

Autonomic computing  Tomorrows computer networks will be intelligent.  They will be able to find faults and correct them without human intervention  Using artificial intelligence computer networks can be made intelligent enough to make self decision  Autonomic computing refers to the self-managing characteristics of a network -Ability of a network to self-heal in the event of failures or faults.  Autonomic network can quickly isolate faults in the network while keeping other parts of the network unaffected.

Cloud Computing  Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service to the users over a network (typically the Internet).  Cloud Computing is the next stage in the Internet's evolution  It is a from computing where everything like Infrastructure, applications, business processes, personal collaboration can be delivered to you as a service wherever and whenever you need.  The “cloud” in cloud computing can be defined as the set of hardware, networks, storage, services, and interfaces that combine to deliver computing as a service.  Cloud services include the delivery of software, infrastructure, and storage over the Internet based on user demand.

Participants in the Cloud Computing  The end user: who doesn’t have to know anything about the underlying technology.  Business management: who needs to take responsibility for the governance of data or services.  Cloud service providers: who is responsible for IT assets and maintenance, and provides a predictable and guaranteed service and security to all their customers.

Future of Cloud Computing  Cloud computing can completely change the way companies use technology to service customers, partners, and suppliers.  Some businesses, such as Google and Amazon, already have most of their IT resources in the cloud.  They have found that it can eliminate many of the complex constraints from the traditional computing environment, including space, time, power, and cost.

Grid Computing  At its most basic level, grid computing is a computer network in which each computer's resources are shared with every other computer in the system.  Processing power, memory and data storage are all community resources that authorized users can tap into and leverage for specific tasks.  The grid computing concept isn't a new one. It's a special kind of distributed computing.  In distributed computing, different computers within the same network share one or more resources.

Grid Computing contd..  In the ideal grid computing system, every resource is shared, turning a computer network into a powerful supercomputer.  With the right user interface, accessing a grid computing system would look no different than accessing a local machine's resources.  Every authorized computer would have access to enormous processing power and storage capacity.

Grid Computing: Example  A well-known grid computing project is the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)  In this PC users worldwide have donated unused processor cycles to help the search for signs of extraterrestrial life by analyzing signals coming from outer space.  The project relies on individual users to volunteer to allow the project to harness the unused processing power of the user's computer.  This method saves both money and resources.

Quantum Computing  The massive amount of processing power generated by computer manufacturers has not yet been able to quench our thirst for speed and computing capacity.  The large amounts of data generated by scientific research, emergence of the Internet, have only fueled our need for more, more and more computing power.  Moore's Law states, the number of transistors on a microprocessor continues to double every 18 months  That means the year 2020 or 2030 will find the circuits on a microprocessor measured on an atomic scale.

 And the logical next step will be to create quantum computers, which will harness(use) the power of atoms and molecules to perform memory and processing tasks.  Quantum computers have the potential to perform certain calculations significantly faster than any silicon-based computer (today's computer).  Scientists have already built basic quantum computers that can perform certain calculations; but a practical quantum computer is still years away.

 Today's computers, work by manipulating bits that exist in one of two states: a 0 or a 1.  Quantum computers aren't limited to two states (1, and 0); they encode information as quantum bits, or qubits, which can exist in superposition (1 and 0 both).  A qubit can represent "1" or "0" but also both at the same time - known as a superposition.  This superposition of qubits is what gives quantum computers the real power and parallelism.  This parallelism allows a quantum computer to work on a million computations at once.

 Qubits represent atoms, ions, photons or electrons and their respective control devices that are working together to act as computer memory and a processor.  Because a quantum computer can contain these multiple states simultaneously, it has the potential to be millions of times more powerful than today's most powerful supercomputers.  A 30-qubit quantum computer would be able to process trillions of floating-point operations per second(teraflopps). Today's desktop computers run at speeds measured in gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second).