Autodesk New Policy - spate of India

[cadtag]

Actually, I was managing privately hosted collaboration web server in 2001 through 2004, that provided every _collaboration_ feature available in today's 'cloud' envirnment, but was as secure and reliable as the IT group wanted it to be. Vastly more manageable than 360 is. It worked quite wonderfully for multi-office. multi-organization projects, and was an excellent repository for any and all electronic project documents. Extremely fine grained control of access and reporting was available if the particular job required it, or the PM could set it up with looser restrictions and treat everyone in his team as a peer.

We did training jobs for crusie lines, water treatment projects for Los Angeles, and international coordination with equal faciliity. One of the nicest parts of the product we deployed was the inherent ability for non-IT staff to manage and organize their day to day work, and never accidentally lose a document. On top of that, the
_context_ and history of every file and version was maintained within the product. Deloitte was a big user globally. EMC owns that app now, and it's still available for either remote hosted, or private hosting scenarios.

So collaboration per se does not require a 'cloud' soultion, however vaguely that's defined. It's entirely possible and practical to do it securely inhouse for an organization of any major size, without having to deal with Terms of Service that claim unlimited rights to company property. since few people other than sole practitioners, partners, or C?? corporate officers have the legal authority to authorize that, any remote service that makes that a part of their ToS is legally unusable for the vast majority of potential users.

The second hyped 'feature' of cloud computing is access to remote CPU power for non-parallel program execution. Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD, is probably the poster child for that. Doing CFD modeling takes a lot of processor time, it's readily distributable, and can be executed out-of-order and reassembled late. Just as movie frames can be rendered on a render farm using multiple PCs.

The problem is, that doing it on a vendor's server is not necessary, not efficient, and inherently insecure. A better solution was developed years ago -- it's just not one that a vendor can resell over and over again to the same people. It's called grid computing, and powers some of the most computationally intensive projects on the planet, from SETI@Home, to folding proteins for cancer research. The management and task distribution engine is done -- all a vendor needs to put together is the
client portion that runs on the background. Instead of the sectretarial PCs w/ 8 cores just running Outlook, they can run Outlook, plus the grid client, and produce productive rendering, cfd, or hydraulic modeling at the same time.

just for an example, I've got a series of obsolete desktops and laptops, raning from a P4 laptop running linux, to an netbook netbook, to a 6 year old Xi CAD box. some of these have come and gone, desktops died and been replaced, but over the past 4 years, they've done the equivalent of 19 years, 43 days of run time for "World community Grid", generating over 10 million points for the Help Conquer Cancer project, and picking up other tasks on their list when that job is slowed down.
Overall, that particular grid computing job has 609K members, running 2 million plus devices, and produces on average 228 YEARS of run time every calendar day.

How much work could be gernated by all the idle cores and all the idle cpu cycles in your organization?

[irneb]

Cloud development isn't just limited to the more publicly available storage options or the direct-from-vendor software as a service model. ...

That's all good and fine, but some companies have a policy that none of their PC's are allowed to connect to anything except the LAN. I.e. making a closed local network (only). They usually have a highly secure firewall only allowing email through. I've seen this with some MEP consultants here, especially if they do lots of business in the mining industry (lots of "security" requirements from their clients). The emails are usually also scanned for phrases / words before allowing it through. Sending them DWG's / RVT's was a pain, since you needed to use RAR/7ZIP and split the file into portions no more than 5MB - then send in separate emails - size restriction on emails as well. Only in one of these instances did I find it possible to get them to download something from FTP (no other connection was allowed, not even HTTP, definitely no other IP port like you get with these "cloud" stuff). Usually we just burned to CD/DVD and couriered - at least then it "got there".

As for cloud "efficiency" ... nope ... the only point where it "might" be more efficient to use a cloud system is with rendering (especially animated). But from my empirical tests, the 360 rendering is nearly 2x slower than simply doing the same on my i7 (and that was for a walk-through). This was even after deducting the time taken to upload the model - which was yet another time extra (but I did this to be "fair"). And if I use V-Ray instead then I can even get LAN connected PC's to help out on a single frame rendering (effectively using their CPU-cores as if it was part of my PC) ... in which case the rendering was even faster than that. So no! Cloud is just stupid. If you want "cloud" then for graphics applications a Remote Desktop session is a lot better / simpler / more robust / less costly / faster / etc. For viewing "cloud" is nothing extra over a http/ftp file to download ... a big f-ing MEH! Even for documents (like Google Docs) it's too slow and cumbersome (used it before, now I just use it as a file store like drop-box), I even prefer Word over that (and that's saying something since I hate Word, prefer LO-Writer / WordPerfect).