FIXZR

Aluminium smelters tend to be based next to giant hydro-electric damns. They consume so much power it makes sense to move the facility to the power source rather than distribute the power to the facility (and suffer the resulting transmission losses). A similar argument is applied (but in reverse one could argue) to combined heat and power installations for homes (placing micro-generators in houses to heat us whilst powering the TV). In one case we have massive centralisation, and the other massive distribution.

And what has this got to do with Cloud Computing? We’ll we may see giant data centres moving to the world’s beauty spots as they become ever more power hungry - imagine google cuddling up to Niagra Falls (or Amazon moving it’s EC2 cloud to the real amazon). We might also conversely see interconnected media servers in every home, cutting down on data transmission costs (and maybe even heating the home a little as the petabytes whirr away generating all that ‘waste’ heat). The question for computing, as with power, is whether it is better to have super efficient centralised facilities (and cope with the transmission headache somehow) or an intelligent distributed grid (and cope with maintenance somehow). As with all things Tech, it will probably go one way, and then the other (with everyone arguing the position to be adopted in 10-20 years time decried as idiots in the meantime).

Sitting firmly on the fence here I’d like to have a home media server which I can contact from anywhere - I may even be willing to offer up some cycles to the ‘grid’ (subject to security being sorted properly). But I’d also like to be able to call upon a full back-up of all my data, and some heavy lifting cloud servers to beef up my iPhone-a-like when needed. On the power side, combined heat and power seems to make a lot of sense, but I’d want to make very sure than the lights didn’t go out when (inevitably) the ‘bolier’ needs to be repaired (with a 3 day wait).