As I begin this post, Greg Papadopoulos is concluding his SAS 2007 address. It is always interesting to watch GregP paint a picture of the future, with broad brush strokes that somehow introduce subtle variations here and there. Parts of his presentation re-iterated ideas in some of his blog posts - particularly The Ecology of Computing.

The Redshift is a property of light equivalent to the Doppler Effect property of sound, and occurs when a light source moves away from the observer : the light emanating from the source shifts toward the Red part of the VIBGYOR spectrum. It became the basis for Hubble's law, and is often cited as evidence for an expanding universe.

As it applies to systems, Greg used the term as a leading observation of the expanding market. He began by establishing magnitudes of increase in compute throughput capabilities over time and contrasted it with the relatively sedate world economic growth in the same period. The question then is what or who is fueling the seemingly disproportionate demand for computing? One answer is the proliferation of client devices that require backend systems to obtain information from, communicate with, and send back telemetry to. Another angle to it is High Performance Computing - organizations weren't doing some processing that they would have liked to, because either there wasn't enough compute capacity to do it, or it was economically/ecologically unviable to harness that capacity. Over a period of time, Moore's Law makes it feasible, and HPC customers commence running those tasks.

The third category, one that Greg called *-Prises or Star-Prises, are organizations like Google or Sun's own Network.com - aggregators of function or capacity that individuals or enterprises used to own earlier. A Salesforce.com, for instance, will obviate the need for a start-up to build it's own CRM infrastructure. Given the number of start-ups Palo Alto cafes spawn, and the number of mature organizations that think CRM is not a core competency, a provider of CRM as a service could grow at a clip that Moore's Law can no longer keep pace with. Voilà, *-Prise.

All three sectors view IT as a competitive weapon. There will be sectors that consider IT as a cost centre, and Sun continues to innovate in areas like consolidation, virtualization and power-efficient computing to address those.

Chip Multi-Threading and Project Blackbox (by the way, is Blackbox coming to a city near you?) are two responses by Sun to the Redshift. Combined with an Operating System that eats threads for breakfast, they form a perfect platform for those who are under-served by Moore's Law.

Greg also described the Neptune and Crossbow projects - designed to cope with the exploding network bandwidth demands. To continue borrowing from astronomy, I see the Redshift as an Event horizon, which is a sort of cosmological Tipping Point. It would be incautious to persist with the metaphor though, because it leads to the point of no return!

Tags : sun; redshift