School: Raffles Institution
Team members: Low Jia Jin, Loke Wei Jie, Wong Zhi Yang
Imagine that your bulky desktop computer is now just a screen with a small microchip, imagine that you can access the work you did at home from your laptop without the hassle of saving it onto a storage device or specialized web host, and imagine that your Smartphone has the computational potential power of dozens of modern desktops combined.
Welcome to CloudOS
CloudOS is a revolutionary paradigm in distributed network computing, redefining the traditional notion of a PC altogether. Instead of being an input, computational, and output device all in one, we remove the computational element from the equation altogether.
In CloudOS, users are allocated a designated amount of storage, system memory and processing muscle in a centralized computing cluster. This creates a personal space whereby a full-fledged operating system is deployed. Back at home, users send input data from our computer peripherals (keyboard, mouse, etc.), where it is packaged as instructions and sent via the internet to our reserved personal space in the cluster to be processed. After being processed in the cloud, the output in the form of visual and audio feeds is encoded and transmitted back to our computers, where a receiver picks it up and displays it to us.
This goes beyond modern distributed databases (Google Docs, Mediafire, Dropbox, etc.) as the cluster is now not just a home for document storage, it is a hub of processing. In fact, you can do anything that you would otherwise do on your PC from CloudOS, you can surf the web, create documents and files, even install and play games, all from that same online environment. Simply put, the end-user experience is not compromised, and ideally, it should not be functionally different from a locally based system runtime environment at each operational instance. In fact, your entire PC is now but an IO (input/output) interface, meaning that all your data is always at one place.
Implications for labour and personal mobility
A game that you install from one PC at home can be played from another PC at your friend’s place. A spreadsheet that you finish up on your laptop can be accessed from another laptop you borrowed from your colleague.
Your “virtual computer” of sorts, now follows you anywhere you go all you need is an IO device to access it from, and a steady internet connection. In fact, enhancing this idea of mobility is that computers can get smaller and thinner, as the need for bulkier, more powerful hardware for processing chores is now offloaded onto the cloud, all your system needs is a small microprocessor with minimal computational overhead to display the output data from your cloud space. This use of PCs as just IO panels has another implication for mobility small mobile devices are no longer constrained by computational power, as the speed of your PC is only limited by the speed reserved for you in the cloud. Your Smartphone could theoretically be the face of the next supercomputer.
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