IBM calls its approach of fine-tuning hardware and software for specific jobs “hybrid computing.” And it will open a Hybrid Computing Research laboratory later this year, inviting industry and university scientists to work cooperatively on new application-specific designs intended to improve performance by between 100 and 1,000 times compared with today’s systems.
The fresh look at computer design is being prompted by the surge in Internet data, from social networking to smartphone applications to sensors monitoring food shipments and electrical use. By 2011, IDC estimates, there will be 1 trillion Internet-connected devices, up from 500 million in 2006.
“This huge explosion of data is driving a movement to design systems around workloads because it is the only way to deliver the computation needed and it’s far more energy-efficient,” said Kunle Olukotun, a computer scientist at Stanford.
IBM had an initiative, begun early last year, called Blue Cloud, which mainly involved adapting its server computers for cloud technology.
Most major technology suppliers have cloud-related hardware and software products, including Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Dell. But IBM, analysts say, is going further by offering simplified, integrated stacks of hardware and software, as well as cloud services.
IBM’s cloud strategy, the company said, is the culmination of 100 prototype projects with companies and government agencies over the last year, and its research partnership with Google.
“The information technology infrastructure is under stress already, and the data flood is just accelerating,” IBM chief executive Samuel Palmisano said. “We’ve decided that how you solve that starts by organizing technology around the workload.”
One of IBM’s test beds for cloud computing has been the Interior Department’s National Business Center, a service center that handles payroll, human relations, financial reporting, contracting services and other computing tasks for dozens of federal agencies. The center runs two large data centers, one in Northern Virginia and another outside Denver, Colorado.
Douglas Bourgeois, the center’s director, said he was introducing several cloud-style applications over the next nine months including Web-based training and staffing and recruitment software. And in tests with financial and procurement software, the cloud-computing environment has delivered efficiencies of between 40 percent and 60 percent in productivity and power consumption, he said.
“For us, like other data centers, the volume of data continues to explode,” Bourgeois said. “We want to solve some of those problems with cloud computing, so we don’t have to build another US$20 million data center.”
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