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A comment on The Future of Computing - An Interview with Yukihiro “Matz" Matsumoto. Parent comment

Re:The Future of Computing - An Interview with Yukihiro “Mat... by stephengillie on Saturday June 29, 2013 @01:30PM (#5963118)
Right now, datacenters are just starting to fully abstract the OS from the hardware -- physical servers run "hypervisor OSes", which can host several virtual servers and live-transfer them from physical host to physical host. And the hypervisor OS does little else.

Meanwhile, virtual servers handle all of the actual software tasks. Through advanced routing, these virtual servers remain connected regardless of which physical server hosts them, and even while being moved from one physical host to another. Thanks to virtual HDDs on SANs, these virtual servers can always reach their virtual HDDs, regardless of physical device failures.

Virtualization tech has already entered browsers. And browsers are slowly becoming the entire client, as we've seen with Chromebooks. It's just a matter of time for these movements to all collide, allowing for virtual servers to freely roam the spare memory and CPU space of all of your browser-OS-based computing devices.

This would be sort of like running Hyper-V on all of your users' Win8 desktops to host your email, directory, database, and information servers. Boom, no server!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Future of Computing - An Interview with Yukihiro “Mat... by seanmcdirmid on Saturday June 29, 2013 @08:30PM (#5964232)
Those that work in this area do not believe virtualization is the answer to our large distributed system cluster woes. They work great for cloud computing utilities that take customers, but are unnecessary overhead for the high performance stuff (Hadoop, MapReduce, Spark, etc...).
[ Parent | on HN ]