Itanium Rising: Breaking Through Moore's Second Law of Computing Power

The Pendulum Swing of Distributed Computing Versus Centralized Computing

Given the ideas that we wanted to offer for the next generation of computing power, it's worth asking, Why did HP decide to pursue the concept of computing as a utility? There are two main reasons for this shift: the move back toward the idea of central computing management and the growth of the World Wide Web and its attendant shift of users' perceptions about where their computing dollars can be spent. It's worth exploring both of these ideas in more detail.

Curiously, the mainstream idea about how to make computing power available to an organization swings back and forth like a pendulum between two models. At one end of the spectrum is the distributed computing idea, ...