Future of Moore’s Law - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 523

A.1 Cloudware and Moore's Law
Deploying cloudware entails transferring processing to the cloud. What are
the economic issues of moving a task from one computer to another? A com-
putation task has four characteristic dimensions:

• Computation—transforming information to produce new

information
• Database Access—access to reference information needed by the
computation
• Database Storage—long-term storage of information (needed for
later access)
• Networking—delivering questions and answers

The ratios among these quantities and their relative costs are pivotal: it is
fine to send a GB over the network if it saves years of computation, but it is
not economical to send a kilobyte question if the answer could be computed
locally in a second. Consequently, on-demand computing is only economi-
cal for very CPU-intensive (100,000 instructions per byte or a CPU day-per
gigabyte of network traffic) applications; for most other applications, pre-
provisioned computing is likely to be more economical.
But considering the trends, one can conjecture that Moore's law will con-
tinue to remain valid not for the processing chips per se, but for the cost of
cloudware: cloudware i.e Internet-accessible computing power would double every
2 years .