The man who introduced the term “exaflood” into our vocabulary (which is in reference to the exabytes of data that was transmitted through the internet several years ago) now has come up with a new piece of syntax for the IT community to chew on–“exacloud”. As stated in detail in a recent FCC filing, Bret Swanson has revised his original term to include the vast possibilities of the cloud. As the filing states, “It is cloud computing but of a scope and scale never seen before. Imagine a supercomputer built not of microprocessors (CPUs) but of thousands of graphics processors (GPUs)…in 1% of the space and for 3% of the cost we can build a graphics supercomputer that delivers three times Roadrunner’s performance–three petaflops.” While the concept is exciting as Swanson describes it, some argue that this has all been going on already for a number of years…so what’s the excitement about?
Forget the Exaflood—Get Ready for the “Exacloud”!
April 29, 2010