Cisco Systems this week announced their $1 billion Intercloud that will link nine partner companies to offer an OpenStack-based, app-centric cloud system supposedly aimed at the Internet of Things. That’s a lot of buzzwords for one press release and what it means is Cisco doesn’t mean to be left behind or to be left out of the IT services business. But Cisco’s isn’t the big cloud announcement this week: the really big announcement comes today from little Mainframe2.
This morning at the big nVIDIA GPU Technical Conference in Silicon Valley Mainframe2 demonstrated two new PC applications — Google Earth and Microsoft Word — running on its graphical cloud. This is significant not only because it implies (there’s been no announcement) that Mainframe2 has two new customers, but both companies are cloud vendors in their own right, so we can guess that Mainframe2 will be supported at some point by both Google’s cloud platform and Microsoft Azure.
Mainframe2, as you’ll recall from the two columns I’ve written previously about it (here and here), is a startup that enables cloud hosting of graphically-intensive PC applications. If you are a software developer and want to put your app on the cloud, Mainframe2 claims you can do so in 10 minutes or less and for almost no money. The app runs on a cloud of nVIDIA virtual GPUs with the screens painted as HTML5 video streams. This means you can effectively run Windows apps on your iPad, for example.
The first apps demonstrated on the Mainframe2 platform were from Adobe Systems and Autodesk. Now they’ve added Google and Microsoft. Oh, and Firefox is now a supported browser in addition to Chrome, Opera, and Safari.
I don’t know any more about this than you do at this point but let’s take some guesses about where this is headed.
All of these software companies that have allowed their applications to be demonstrated on Mainframe2 are potential — even likely — customers for the company. Google and Microsoft, as cloud vendors, are likely to license Mainframe2 (and its underlying nVIDIA Grid) in some form for their clouds. Mainframe2 launched originally on Amazon Web Services but I have to believe that support will shortly appear from a whole list of the usual suspect cloud service providers. That means Google and Microsoft will likely be offering their own graphical clouds.
While previous Mainframe2 demos were run from a single data center on the U.S. west coast, the new demos are supported from data centers on the U.S east coast, Europe, and Japan as well.
Given that this week’s demo of Microsoft Word on Mainframe2 can’t officially run on Internet Explorer, you can bet Redmond will be fixing that problem shortly.
Update — Apparently Mainframe2 isn’t demoing Microsoft Word after all. It doesn’t take advantage of the GPU, I’m told, but more importantly I guess there are some licensing issues left undone. I’ve seen the demo, but it’s not a done deal.
I’m not here to announce Game Over, but it seems to me the addition of these companies that normally don’t have anything to do with each other to the Mainframe2 list gives this little company an insurmountable lead in cross-platform cloud support for traditional desktop applications. Now all we need are Linux and Mac apps on Mainframe2. I’m sure the former will be coming and I’m not so sure about the latter but we’ll see.
This is a kick in the head to competing efforts that are based on protocols like VNC and RDP, which simply can’t repaint the screen as fast as Mainframe2. Think about it, RDP is a Microsoft technology yet here Microsoft is appearing to support Mainframe2. That’s a big deal.
Going even further, Mainframe2’s ability to dynamically reassign virtual GPUs to a task implies a great leveling in the desktop arms race. Once a very broad selection of popular applications are available on Mainframe2 it won’t matter beyond a certain point how many cores or how much RAM you have on your desktop (or mobile!). Any computer will be able to run any app on any platform at any speed you are willing to pay for, so my three-times-per-year use of PhotoShop is going to fly.
This is a huge change in the market that PC hardware vendors will hate but PC software vendors should love because it will give them a whole new — and much broader — distribution channel. Sure there will be customers who’ll still choose to run their apps locally, but for another class of casual users there is a new alternative. And for the software companies and cloud vendors there’s a whole new source of revenue.
What we’ll see in the next 1-2 years is broad adoption of this platform with eventually most ISVs offering Mainframe2 versions of their products. Some companies will commit to the platform exclusively, I’m sure. But this period is like porting all your music from vinyl to CDs: there’s a lot of money to be made but it’s mainly just doing the old stuff in a different way. What I wonder about is what happens after this stage, when we start to see native Mainframe2 apps? What will those be like? When will we see the first native Mainframe2 game, for example? What will that be like?
This is going to be exciting — something we wouldn’t even have dreamed of a year ago.
This sounds very similar to what OnLive did for games many moons ago. What happened to OnLive? It stagnated because the limiting factor for the average user is bandwidth for screen updates — not local compute power which is cheap and plentiful. Any ordinary game console provided a better experience than OnLive, and they could not undercut that price since their servers didn’t come free either.
Web applications are increasingly taking over, sure enough, but I still think they’ll follow the model of fat clients that limit server data exchange as much as possible. That’s what makes sense given that communication speed grows very slowly (for the average person not living in some Internet mecca) whereas local browser execution speed is rapidly growing on all devices, and it’s obviously more economical to let the customer’s machine do the work rather than do it on your server.
Imagine you’re a big corporate customer that has tens of thousands of employees with desktop systems. Each system must have the apps installed and licensed. Each PC needs security updates. Each PC is another possible open door to malware.
And, each PC is slowly dying a painful technological obsoleteness. No one wants to use a PC that’s two years old.
Now, imagine that company passing out iPads that access all needed apps via Mainframe2. No licenses to track. No PCs that are obsolete.
Now, when I say “passing out” I mean giving them to the employees as their machines for keeps. If the employee loses one, they must buy a new one. Why not? There’s no corporate information on the iPad — it’s all on Mainframe2! Soon, businesses will become strictly BYOD places. Want to work on a Mac? Bring one in! Don’t like Apple? Bring in an Android Tablet, or a Windows machine!
Suddenly, companies are out of the PC business. They’re IT infrastructure is in some cloud provider and their programs run on Mainframe2.
Now, how much will a company save by going to Mainframe2.
But wait there’s more!
When companies switch to iPads, they find they can shrink their real estate by as much as 40%. When you get rid of every employee needing a large desktop PC of their very own, you can greatly shrink the amount of real estate you need.
David W. ,
A few things. I agree, individual machines make for an expensive lesson in amortization. However, for me, productivity would be an issue. I’m usually looking for more screen real-estate, not less. I want to be able to switch between multiple apps, or see full pages from two apps side-by-side. Text selection on a tablet is rough, at best.
But the real concern for me would be my personal privacy. A device handed out by a corporation is bound to have so much “security” extras, that I don’t think I’d want to take it home or have it on my home network. Think corporate spyware to “keep you honest”. If you have any doubts, search for “Lower Merion School Spying”. Here the school had secretly installed software on school supplied laptops. The software allowed them to enable cameras without alerting the students.
Sorry, I think I’l pass. Thank you very much.
I’d put your first point in a more explicit way: Mobile devices are a means of information _consumption_, while desktop PCs are meant for information _creation_. These roles are as different as those of Hollywood studios and movie theaters around the country – their premises, equipment and processes are bound to be different. Same is true about difference in corporate and consumer users of IT systems.
While this is pretty sweet, it is just another fantastic technology that will gobble up bandwidth and cause me to hit my quota that much quicker. It is too bad bit carriers, like AT&T have to report to Wall Street every quarter and investors only care about today’s earnings, not tomorrow’s technology.
If the United States wants to be in a position to be a number one tech country, then we need to have the world’s best network. Sadly, I will not hold my breath because we have to squeeze every penny from the consumer and provide sub-standard quality.
Well how is the GPU work done on the server end? Cheap commodity hardware, one unit per running application? If so, the cloud will be buying a lot of GPU hardware. Something has to paint the pixels. It doesn’t happen by magic.
Virtual GPUs were mentioned here multiple times. Basically what that boils down to is that you get a slice of a physical GPU (or slices of multiple physical GPUs, or whatever) for however long that your task needs this (which probably won’t be very long, unless maybe you are doing graphics-heavy stuff), then the GPU(s) move on to doing other tasks. Rinse and repeat. No dedicated GPU(s) necessary, most likely. Theoretically your task could jump around all over the place from one moment to the next, but most systems try to minimize the overhead involved here.
Amazon opened AWS WorkSpace to everyone today. How does Mainframe2 compare to WorkSpace?
die general purpose computing, die!
There is a small hiccup in this plan however. Connectivity quality.
In many locations outages are still common. Often they are small and if you email app has to wait 5 min to send an email you will live. But if your apps live in the cloud there things could be far different. We need a much better internet infrastructure in many places before this can really take off.
Sounds like a killer app for platform agnostic games. Wonder if this could destroy the market for game consoles as well…
There’s no such thing as “platform-agnostic games”. The vast majority of games target exactly one platform (a console, a mobile device, the Web). Some target two platforms (one console and PC, or iOS and Android; some may have some sort of Web interface) – but that’s hardly “agnostic”.
That being said, transferring image and video streams around will never beat transferring metadata. Metadata is superior in interoperability, performance, machine-usability etc. Also, things like virtualization, thin clients and so on have been around for a long time now. Including metadata-based solutions – take X11 remote apps for example, it’s been available for decades.
Mainframe2 is evolutionary, not revolutionary (and so’s the cloud, just in case anybody thought otherwise). Of course all companies dealing with the cloud or the network in any way will at least consider it and make use of it. But it will not replace PCs for any kind of professional creative work, it won’t replace consoles for gaming, won’t replace mobile devices for information consumption on the go. It’s a specialized solution among many, it will find its niche and that’s it.
The NSA will love this!!!!
Doesn’t work on Internet Explorer or Firefox on this end. Both are up to date via automatic updates system… Looks like a bit more R&D is required….
Bob,
I’m curious about your thoughts on Microsoft changing the name of Azure from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure. I’m sure that wasn’t a decision made lightly.
Thanks,
Joe
MF2 will not impact large corporations or data centers in any way, in that corp. data will remain within the internal network (or so-called “trusted” tunnels to external DC’s such as Microsoft’s). Security, proprietary info exposure and proxy bandwidth are the show stoppers. MF2 will be for consumers and small companies with no security concerns, each with high speed network connections.
Unless the Mainframe software stack is sold stand-alone to run in local DC’s, we’ll be using 3D accelerated VNC’s for quite a while. As for engineering/HPC apps, no-one will be using an iPad unless a mouse pointer makes a debut on it. 😉
Marketing vs reality. One of these things is not like the other…
http://i.imgur.com/Ccq5iyO.jpg
Using Chrome Version 33.0.1750.152 on Ubuntu
I got the same error message using latest IE (10) on Windows 8. Perhaps it needs the IE 11 version for Windows 8.1. If anyone has Windows 8.1 and IE 11, let us know if it works.
If you are talking about the “We’re sorry” message at http://i.imgur.com/Ccq5iyO.jpg. It appears using Windows 8.1 and the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Explorer. The latest version of Canary doesn’t seem to want to install. The version I had just froze with a blank screen for http://i.imgur.com/Ccq5iyO.jpg.
Oops. Didn’t realize I was retrieving a .jpg 🙂
It looks like they have switched to a trial beta arrangement where you have to request a survey via email and then wait for them to accept you. The old links that Bob provided previously say it should work on the latest chrome and safari browsers but the current home page only offers the beta-trial-survey route.
[…] See on http://www.cringely.com […]
I think many here are missing one of the best points raised by Bob.
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If you need to use Photoshop a few times a year you can do so without having to buy Photoshop. Big saving for you; bigger market for Adobe.
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That alone could be a game changer. And as Bob has pointed out, the system is quick because it’s working differently from pervious cloud computing. It might actually work.
When Bob mentioned that, it occurred to me that using Photoshop a few times a year is unlikely because it’s a complex program requiring skills to use. It takes practice and motivation (frequent use based on need) to get used to it, as with many programs, like Office. One is unlikely to use it occasionally since there are free or cheap alternatives like Photoshop Elements for that. Even though they come out with a new version every year, the old one that you’ve learned to use, will continue to serve the purpose. Photoshop requires a large monitor also, so it’s unlikely one would want to use it from multiple devices.
It’s something that I had considered if the complexity of Photoshop would prevent a user from trying it. I can only speak from my own experiences.
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Photoshop Elements has so little of Photoshop in it that it was worthless. Absolute junk.
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When I got access to Photoshop I was quickly able to learn how to use some of the functions that I needed. I will not say that I knew how to use all of it, but I knew enough of what I needed to get the results I was looking for. There was at the time no other package that I knew of that could have.
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I think we have to trust Bob when he says he’s tried using the cloud version and that it’s useable. Although you do make a very valid point on screen size.
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Finally, I would have to say that I’ve found using GIMP adequate recently, not as good as Photoshop but I’m not going to pay the amount Adobe are asking. I would have bought Elements if there was any of Photoshop in it, but they kept all the good stuff out.
I have to disagree, Photoshop for basic work is not hard to use at all. Yeah, if you want to do some really fancy work it can be very daunting, but then so can Word or Excel.
I’d love to have a solution for the same issue that Bob has. I only need Photoshop maybe once or twice a year. Right now I have to go to a friend’s house upload my graphics and work there. Having Photoshop available when I need it and without paying for a full license would be great.
“Having Photoshop available when I need it and without paying for a full license would be great.” I could go for that if they would allow a check box labeled “free for practice or learning purposes”. That way I would only be paying for “needed for productive work” vs “needed to learn how to use Photoshop”.
Great concept. Superb for a independent user who does not want to invest in high power workstations and has little data to manage. Independent ISVs should support this. We have seen their resistance to port their products for general purpose GPU computing. How to manage the huge data moment up and down the cloud and the cost of bandwidth? If these issue are managed successfully I do not see any hurdle in the world entering into the next generation computing era
MF2 can’t get online soon enough. Setting up RDP or Citrix is hard enough, but the real fun is sorting out all the licensing issues. If MF2 can offload that burden, they’ll have plenty of customers.
Timesharing — What a great concept!
Thin client, anyone?
IIRC, “Intelligent Workstation” was the term that IBM was using for this 20-odd years ago. Which at the time just meant pretty much a bog-standard PC, but today would be more of a thin client. Store the data on the (relatively) Big Iron “server”, where it is better protected and subject to normal processing and standard backup routines and such, and do advanced processing and analytics and graphics and such on the “Intelligent Workstation”. Software updates for the Workstation could be downloaded from the server, too. The PC-type folks never really saw things this way, though (well, at least not until they “invented” client/server computing as we know it today), so the concept didn’t take off at the time.
“This is going to be exciting — something we wouldn’t even have dreamed of a year ago.”
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So. Much. Irony.
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As several others have already pointed out, this is basically an old concept with a new coat of paint, and even as a modernized concept it’s not really that original. As someone who has been in the computer racket for over three decades now, I must say that I have continually enjoyed watching PC-types re-inventing “new” concepts that are really old concepts which may (or may not, given technological advances) be past their expiration date.
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Agreed. Mainframes & “dumb” terminals. What’s old is new!
Maybe this is a dumb question, and maybe it’s a feature rather than a bug … but if you have a setup like this, can you plug a USB drive into it? Especially when people talk about businesses replacing all their machines with iPads.
I found this for adding usb drives: https://www.hypershop.com/HyperDrive/ but whether Mainframe2 will let you use it is another matter.