Fog computing

If it seems to you that nothing is visible in the picture, then I will answer, the fog is clearly depicted in the picture! ;) In connection with the exit from the forced gaddy silence, I publish my small futurological essay.

Hurrah! What the Bolsheviks were afraid to ask about so long ago happened! In the wake of cloud computing today, we are opening the era of fog computing!

Misty computing - and it sounds somehow foggy. I’ll try to briefly convey this paradigm to a reader who is unarmed with Wikipedia and Google. For the armed, it’s necessary to say that this phrase has already been misplaced by one of the types of cloud computing, which essentially do not differ from them.

So, foggy computing. As you might guess, a “fog” is, like a “cloud,” some associated distributed computing power. Let’s take a differential approach to the cloud and suppose that instead of one discrete cloud node (yes, in real clouds there are no nodes and this is all the fakeness of this term), we have a scalar field (distribution, processor, RAM, ROM, input / output devices) in the density volume) of computing power, random access memory and read-only memory, as well as the vector field of data streams.

At this point, you can exhale and then try without these troubles. Computers are getting smaller. Computers are getting cheaper. Now the MP3 player has computing power orders of magnitude greater than the first computer designed to solve over-critical military and scientific tasks. About the size and most importantly - I am silent about energy consumption. Now the density of computing devices is so high that it is just right to apply statistical methods to it. Once I saw an excellent article, where the total calculation was given. power of devices in a cut vych. power of one device and it turned out that all the power is not in supercomputers, but in cheap mobile phones.

Along with the cheapening of computers, communication systems have also become cheaper. Bluetooth is almost everywhere and I'm not sure that it is not in my sneakers. And right now, there are no barriers to ensure that all these small weak computing machines are combined into one big lilac computing fog.

The “fog” is based on a “drop” - a microcontroller chip with memory and an interface for transmitting data on board, and a wireless chip such as Mesh (sensor network). The “drop” receives power from a small battery, which nevertheless is enough for a couple of years of work with regular sleep breaks (picoPower from Atmel steers). Input devices (sensors of all stripes, from temperature and voltage to position in space and the level of ultraviolet radiation) and output (LEDs, LCD and ice indicators, dry contacts, etc.) can already be connected to the “drop”. It already smells like Skynet, not right?

“And when we are a stone's throw from a pile of fabulous riches ...” - as the hero of the famous multimedia musical sang, the most interesting thing remains - information that is not directly connected with these sensors can be stored and processed in this network. Obviously, for most tasks, the performance of modern microcontrollers is more than enough and we get a field of excess computing power. And money, cartridges, and processing power, as you know, is never superfluous.

To provide more efficient data transmission, additional tunnels will be created in the fog - some “drops” can have high-speed interfaces and provide better fog connectivity. In less than 10 years, the computational fog will cover the entire habitat of a reasonable person, and from commercial private clouds the calculations will go into a fog that does not have an owner. Programs will parasitize on computational fog and compete with each other. It will be an ecosystem, an order of magnitude more vibrant than the Internet.

Here we have such a thing. We’ll wait and see if S. Lem was right in his “Futurological Congress” and I am in the computational fog?