The Redshift Techno-Economic Theory
The Redshift theory basically categorizes computing needs as either growing faster or slower than Moore’s Law. Traditional business is over-served by Moore’s Law, whereas applications such as financial market simulations, drug industry research, computer animation, and the high-growth end of the internet industry (Facebook, You-Tube, Flickr), are needing computing resources faster than Moore’s Law. These industries are apparently the ones going to generate above-GDP levels of return to an investor.
This theory was advanced by Greg Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems. One of Sun’s solutions for servicing the computing needs of “Redshifting” companies is Project Blackbox - providing as much computing power as possible inside a shipping container.
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August 21st, 2007 at 7:00 pm
[...] thought leader for Red Shift is Web 2.0. Not far out of the limelight are such applications as financial market simulations, drug industry research, and computer animation. The shift to SaaS (growing 43 percent annually, according to a recent report by RBC Capital [...]
August 24th, 2007 at 9:31 am
I really liked the commentary in the post “Are You Red Shifted?”. Apart from pointing out the limitations of throwing bigger and bigger hardware at a problem (what happens when you are at the hardware limit?), Bob Warfield also talks about whether the future does indeed belong to the database. My own take is that data collection process won’t push processing unduly (although in real-time financial feeds, for example, processing power can be an issue). What will really push the envelope is the data mining, “collective intelligence”, algorithmic trading and other computational tasks that will grow exponentially in complexity as your data grows linearly.