Super Grid
Tools:
Over the past 120 years, thousands of electric utilities have collaborated based on open standards to build over a hundred national electric utility grids that generate and transmit and distribute electricity that these utilities sell to business and home customers. FNC and its partners are working to construct a roughly similar grid based on computing power rather than electrical power. We will develop, deliver and install a global information Super Grid to provide massive, cost-effective, high productivity and trusted information services for pervasive healthcare, education, entertainment, financial, logistics, science and engineering applications in China and worldwide.
Cloud computing is a massive re-invention of the architecture at the start of the Information Age, time sharing, when people could not afford to purchase their own mainframe computer. Businesses rented time on machines and paid by the hour or day. As new architectures, such as the minicomputer and microcomputer became available, and routers enabled internetworking of many different networks and operating systems, it became feasible for businesses to own their own computers. However, major advances in both technology (primarily Moore’s Law, which is a heuristic that hold the number of transistors in a given area will double every 18 months, roughly doubling computing power per dollar every 18 months) and in business models and financing (especially software as a service or the ability to rent software applications) have changed the game to once again give the cost and capability advantage to hardware and software resources that are owned by others but made easily available to (eventually) anyone anywhere who has a computing device with communications capability. Or, to put it another way, the sort of computing power that in the 1980s was available only to a department or ministry of defense can be made available, for a short time, to an individual with a smart phone. We refer to the combination of cloud computing and supercomputing as the Super Grid. Welcome to the new computing revolution.
The Super Grid itself is infinitely scalable, unlike all previous time sharing architectures, and can be physically distributed by creating nodes at major cities of all countries and connected globally as a single information services network on the Internet. Billions of people in the world, using ultra-low-cost mobile devices, will be able to access, store and process all their personal information on the Super Grid in a friendly, secure and reliable way.
The success of the Super Grid development will revolutionize the information industry by making information services as easy and as ubiquitous and inexpensive as electric utilities make electricity available. The Super Grid will offer equal information access opportunities for all people (rich and poor), elevate human productivity, facilitate the discovery of creative talents, energize local economies in under-privileged areas, and preserve the natural environment by reducing the massive power consumption required to keep all the separate servers running 24/7/365.
The scale of the Super Grid will be almost beyond human imagination, but it’s worth a moment to reflect on relative size. The largest machine in the world is the North American electric power grid, a single interconnected system that provides over 100 million households and over 340 million people with enough electricity to power dozens or hundreds of electrical devices per household, and up to millions of devices per factory or office complex. FNC is collaborating with pioneers in supercomputing, blade computing and cloud computing to bring into existence a computing machine that is even larger and will serve more people than the North American electric power grid, with even more features.
Our vision is of a world in the 2020s in which billions of people can access as much processing power, memory and storage, specialized software applications as is needed and pay only for the brief time of use, putting billions of dollars worth of computing power in the hands of individuals for the few seconds they need to use it, for a tiny fraction of the cost.
Why is FNC confident that the Super Grid is worthy of investment in the billions of dollars? We can summarize these into four words: infrastructure, growth, transparency, and versatility.
First, the Super Grid is an essential technology for the New Economy, and essential infrastructure to make 4G and the Smart Grid, as well to make possible hundreds of new industries, many of which are mostly unknown by the public and all of which will need massive computing power and inexpensive apps on demand. The nations that were first to develop core technology and applications around 2G wireless (such as Finland) were able to develop massive national champion companies, like Nokia (worth hundreds of billions) and Sonera (worth tens of billions), even though the leaders were sometimes very small nations. Creating new and novel infrastructure is like a rising tide that floats all boats, including tens of thousands of businesses and millions of homes.
Second, in a world struggling to recover from the first global contraction in 60 years and growth rates (excluding China and India) of only a few percent, cloud computing is one of the very rare industries that has growth rates that seem more like those in the late ‘90s rather than the age of diminished expectations in 2008 to 2010. Cloud computing is growing at compound annual growth rate of about 70%, and is expected to do so until 2014. IDC has stated that worldwide IT cloud service market will grow from $16.2 billion in 2008 to $42.2 billion in 2012.
Third, the unique architecture of the Super Grid created by FNC’s core partner makes it possible to instantly, transparently, and seamlessly add excess capacity. The problem with most, perhaps all cloud computing architectures today, is decreasing marginal returns. That is, at some hard to predict point, as more computing power is added, there isn’t a comparable performance increase, and a computational equivalent of “hitting the wall”, where you just can’t get your money’s worth out of the network in the same way as you used to. The architecture that FNC is championing is, to the best of our knowledge, the most transparent and scalable architecture available. This bears directly on the financial projections, and thus the investment worthiness, because this transparency allows a new level of confidence in financial projections of capacity and capability with large numbers of nodes.
Fourth, the Super Grid has dozens of applications that can, in a way that combines both the first and second reasons for investment consideration, infrastructure and growth, enable vertical applications and new markets that will themselves become fast growing areas, and which also might on their own merits be worthy of additional investment. While this is an introduction to the subject of the Super Grid, it is worth giving a summary overview to spark more detailed discussions and presentations with FNC, starting with the first government and non-government applications, and then giving the names of different applications.
Health care: the first application for government of the Super Grid architecture is in health care, with the digitization of medical records for 35 million people in China. With the commercial explosion of ever more detailed scans (PET scans, CAT scans, MRIs) and the move from 2D to 3D, the file size (and thus memory needed), the complexity, the number of health care professionals who will see the scans, and the growing geographic distance that the scans will be sent all create an explosion of demand for ever more computing power, new medical software apps, memory, bandwidth, and means to sort and file different information so that multiple records can be looked at in multiple places by multiple people with multiple government health agencies getting their portion of the data as laws require more data to be recorded for multiple public health purposes. This is a perfect application for the Super Grid, especially in the US, where health care is now a $2.5 trillion a year industry that is the source of the largest debate between the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Health care is also of great concern in most other nations, which either currently bear the cost of most health care (as in Europe) or where a new health care system will be required based on rapid aging of the population (China, Japan, and Russia).
Entertainment: the first non-government application of the Super Grid is to increase by 500% the maximum number of players of massively multiplayer games in South Korea, where computer games are so popular there are television channels to watch others play games, such as Starcraft and the various versions of Warcraft. As 3D digital cinema becomes the norm rather than the exception, the need for a Super Grid grows exponentially, just for this application.
Other application areas for the Super Grid:
- Petroleum and mineral discovery and excavation/extraction
- Weather, earthquake, and tsunami forecasting
- Disaster prevention and reduction
- Biomedical research and development
- Drug testing and discovery
- Aviation and Astronautics
- New materials
- Renewable energy
- System on a chip and precision instrumentation
- Digital hospitals
- Telemedicine, telesurgery, and other remote medical services
- Digital schools and remote education
- Digital government and e-government
- Digital business and e-commerce
- Digital media and entertainment
- Financial services
- Public security