Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Appendix D
Scientific Computing, Information
Technology, and Informatics
INFORMATICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
IT and informatics are in rapid transition. Technologic change in the
global capacity of computing and telecommunication has been growing expo-
nentially (Hilbert and Lopez 2011). The end of Moore's law
1
of exponential
growth in computer hardware power (Robert 2000) will require, for example,
mastery of parallel programming to sustain the growth of computing perform-
ance and to meet the need for analyzing massive amounts of data until a postsili-
con era is realized. The next 10 years will see a massive rebuilding of IT infra-
structure everywhere.
The economics of IT are also changing profoundly, largely under the fa-
vorable pressure of consumer applications. Enormous increases in data band-
width (especially wireless) have made possible a wide array of mobile endpoints
for applications, and this trend will continue. The inability of traditional rela-
tional databases to scale to handle the rapid growth in unstructured, semiconsis-
tent, real-time data on which decisions often need to be made based in the com-
mercial world has led to the emergence of such tools as Map Reduce, Hadoop,
and other next-generation data environments (NoSQL 2012), which are dis-
cussed above. Virtualization is steadily eliminating the concept of a dedicated
server in a fixed location, and cloud computing is transforming the economics of
IT. Social networking, already a major consumer phenomenon, has now entered
the scientific workplace and can be used for heightened collaboration, as dis-
cussed above.
All of the emerging changes will require a more responsive and flexible
approach to the opportunities afforded by global informatics and lead to a sys-
1
Moore's law is a rule of thumb in the history of computing hardware whereby the
number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles
about every 2 years (Moore 1965).
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