What are the primary research issues?
The big questions we’re looking at are, how interchangeable can that computational facility be made, how does it federate across the many instances of the UDC and how do construct a software management structure that can take full advantage of that? What’s going on here in our labs in Palo Alto, California (USA) and in Bristol (UK) is to understand the nature of these generational facilities, how they’ll change over time, how will we virtualize resources and how we will provision them. This is a largely unexamined space. Just by consolidating things into one room, you learn something. Two years ago, the room we have in Palo Alto had 50 computers; by the end of the year, it’ll have around 400. If you look at the next generation of servers, we probably could get 5,000 servers in here in three to five years, and by the end of decade – if you consider some of the work being done by HP Labs around systems architectures — we probably could fit 75,000 to 100,000 servers into that same 2,200-
