Getting Closer to the William Gibson Vision of the Matrix - Can you dig it?

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void....
- William Gibson, Neuromancer

I just got finished reading an article on John Schwartz's blog about steps Sun is taking to bring the idea of true shared computing to the Internet. Basically, folks would be able to run their own supercomputer applications by renting time from a grid that is a virtual supercomputer. Why spend cycles of their own system when you can borrow time on a grid?

This is really close to the original idea of the internet - shared computing - not shared information, which is what we basically see today.

It sounds like we are getting dangerously close to the William Gibson vision of the Martix - which is the whole reason why some of us got into tech in the first place.

Excerpts:

The Network is the Computer

For those that don't know what a grid is, it's a collection of low cost network, storage, computing and software elements, lashed together to do work that historically required very expensive dedicated proprietary technologies

But about a year ago, after Sun outlined plans to build a public, multi-tenant grid (just like the power companies run), and make it available for $1/cpu-hr . . .

Most of us live on the grid at home - we use Google and Yahoo!, we love eBay, we upload and share photos and movies, and gather our news from various sources on the web. Most of us bank from home, we leverage network email services - and if you think about it, that transformation all occurred within the last decade. In the blink of an eye.

Smaller businesses especially have flocked to the grid to spare themselves the headaches of architecting and owning their own datacenters.

Just think back ten years - when most enterprises I met laughed at the idea of putting business systems on the internet. Now you're an anomaly if you're "off the grid."

Building a secure, publicly available multi-tenant grid also turned out to be exceptionally complex - there's a reason no one had ever done it before. Most grids are application specific - for search, or auctions or payment. A general purpose computing grid was ploughing new ground - and we wanted to ensure availability and security would be as high as possible.

If you're read this far, here's a final bit of color on the incredibly fortuitous domain name for the future of computing: Network.com.

So have at it! Go to network.com later this week, grab a PayPal account, and experience for yourself what it's like to use one of the world's largest supercomputers. Without having to house it, manage it, power it, administer it, provision it... or buy it.

Full text.

Everyone read this and let me know what you think . . . are we close?

Jack in.