From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 43

that, whatever the outcome, sparked vigorous encounters about their
potential to expand citizenship and democracy, the cloud is essentially
silent on these issues. There appears to be an enormous gap between the
prodigious sublimity of the cloud's power to process, store, and distribute
information and the banality of its current applications, however practical
and proitable.
While almost all cloud systems operate according to a commercial
model, there are a few exceptions. For example, grid computing is a means
of creating a cloud from below by harnessing the combined power of mil-
lions of personal computers to carry out projects. But even these are typi-
cally organized by commercial enterprises. Since 2004, IBM has sponsored
the World Community Grid, which takes the principle of using the avail-
able space on mainly household PCs to address a variety of public-health
and environmental research projects. Speciically, it makes this combined
computer power available to public and not-for-proit organizations for
use in humanitarian research. All results are in the public domain open to
the global research community. Research projects cover clean water and
energy; the development of drugs to combat malaria and dengue fever; as
well as research on muscular dystrophy, cancer in the young, and AIDS.
For example, advanced computational methods help to identify candidate
drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV
development. Commercial projects are beginning to take advantage of
this distributed processing model, including harnessing idle PCs in homes
(Novet 2013). These open a door to an alternative form of large-scale
computing that does not require a top-down cloud computer model.
Cloud computing therefore distinguishes itself from earlier models in
two fundamental ways. First, receiving the most attention is the capacity
to store, process, and distribute data beyond anything that preceded it.
What were once the exceptional “supercomputers” are now standard in the
half million or so data centers worldwide. Second, even as it has exceeded
its predecessors, cloud computing operates from a diminished vision that
is almost entirely driven by the twin goals of proit and control. There is
little interest in using the cloud to bring democracy, citizen-driven design
and implementation, worker control, or even worker involvement in deci-
sion making. While all of these ideas have been raised in the course of
computing's history, they are not part of debates about today's or tomor-
row's cloud computing.