This morning we heard from Keith Bentley, CTO of Bentley Systems, about some emerging computing trends at the Be Inspired: Infrastructure Best Practices and Awards event in Charlotte. He spoke of a few recent technology announcements as harbingers of growing trends.
He was impressed by Nvidia’s ‘Fermi’ graphics card that will be integrated into the coming supercomputer at Oak Ridge Labs. The new chip has three times the transistors as the company’s current top-of-the-line card, and will contribute to a supercomputer that is ten times more powerful that today’s fastest supercomputer. Bentley saw this as a game changer for taking advantage of massively parallel processors. He said we should no longer think in terms of CPUs, instead thinking about multiple processing units. He sees a bright future in programming for thousands of processing units to work on the same project at the same time.
Another related trend that has Bentley excited is virtualization and cloud computing, asserting that with cloud computing scalability can be addressed easily. He suggested a future where companies no longer needed to worry about configuration management for all of the desktop software that sits on their employees’ machines. He suggested that instead of installation and distribution of software updates and patches, that can pose difficult problems of backward compatibility and issues with other software packages, that users would instead virtually install their software. The virtual install will make it look like software is physically located on each desktop, but not. This approach could change how we manage configurations so that users could run different versions, and switch instantly between different products. The approach could make software updates easier and reduce time-consuming and costly software conflicts.
