Thursday, June 18, 2015

Networks Will Drive Computing Advances

Networking and networks will drive computing in the future, said Amin Vahdat, Google fellow and technical lead for networking. "Networking is at an inflection point in driving next-generation computer architecture," Vahdat said.

"What computing means will largely be dependent on our ability to build great networks over the years," Vahdat noted.

To give you some idea of how long major changes in computing architecture can take, consider that it was in 1984 that Sun Microsystems first began talking about the concept that “the network is the computer.”

As so often happens, the direction was right but the timing was early. The network, in the 1980s, could not effectively support what we now call cloud computing.

Fundamentally, the architecture was a cloud-based computing fabric, where most “computing” took place remotely, not at an end user terminal.

Yet only recently has that become a reality, with the popularity of cloud-based applications that make the network, if not THE computer, then the functional equivalent of the computer bus.


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