This past week, D-Wave Systems announced the sale of the first commercial quantum computer to Lockheed Martin.
Although quantum computers are still in their infancy (we're talking ENIAC-like infancy here), their potential is astounding. The most interesting thing is that certain problems that are hard for conventional computers should be very easy for quantum computers. This could have some really unexpected results, such as defeating almost all of the cryptographic techniques we normally use to protect our information today.
I don't know if what D-Wave has is the beginning of something significant or not. However, for a mere $10M, you could buy one and find out.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
OpenStack
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the OpenStack Design Summit in Santa Clara. It was an amazing event with hundreds of people (most of them developers) and significant representation from major industry players like Citrix, Cisco and Dell.
It is hard to believe that it was only last summer that Rackspace and NASA announced the project. In that time, the project has had three releases.
The project has several major components, including a compute fabric called "Nova" and an S3-like blob store called "Swift".
By most accounts, Swift is ready for prime time (in fact, CloudScaling was involved in several large deployments).
Nova on the other hand is still an early-stage product. Nevertheless, several major players have announced their intention to have product deployments in the near future, including Internap who plans to do so later this year.
All this activity has attracted significant investment, and most of the effort seems to be focused on: block storage as a service (think EBS, sort of), network as a service (check out Nicira), and higher level management and integration functions (basically all those "little" things that turn a technology into a real-world service).
One thing is for sure, this is a space to watch carefully.
DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers.
It is hard to believe that it was only last summer that Rackspace and NASA announced the project. In that time, the project has had three releases.
The project has several major components, including a compute fabric called "Nova" and an S3-like blob store called "Swift".
By most accounts, Swift is ready for prime time (in fact, CloudScaling was involved in several large deployments).
Nova on the other hand is still an early-stage product. Nevertheless, several major players have announced their intention to have product deployments in the near future, including Internap who plans to do so later this year.
All this activity has attracted significant investment, and most of the effort seems to be focused on: block storage as a service (think EBS, sort of), network as a service (check out Nicira), and higher level management and integration functions (basically all those "little" things that turn a technology into a real-world service).
One thing is for sure, this is a space to watch carefully.
DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers.
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