Your Virtualized Future

Nvidia's RealityServer 3.0 will allow high-res synthetic images such as this CAD rendering to play interactively on netbooks and smartphones.

Although rumor and speculation grew on the Web over the past few months, it was only this past week that Google finally unveiled the details of its Chrome operating system. To many observers this might just be another boring, geeky development—after all, who needs another OS?—but Google's announcement points to the growing trend toward hardware and software virtualization that could soon change the way you work.

Although it will still be another year until the final version of the Chrome OS actually releases, Google points to the future. The OS will help fuel the burgeoning market for low-cost, low-power netbooks, one of the fastest-growing sectors of the computer market.

The new software won't even be able to run on typical hard drives, and it will require flash memory to enable fast startups. Since there won't be much local storage compared to what hard drives can provide, it's clear that Google is pushing the move to cloud-based apps, such as its own Google Docs.

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This move beyond local apps running on local storage is just the latest in the move to virtualized hardware and software, a trend that has been picking up speed over the past few years as networks and connectivity improve.

With virtualization, a layer of software between the hardware and the operating system allows you to run several "virtual machines" or instances of a computer on a single piece of hardware. The Mac OS X Boot Camp capability, for example, allows Mac users to run Windows and Linux as well.

Other virtualized operating systems run over a network from a centralized server, further lowering the out-of-pocket costs of hardware and software.

In the future, today's potent desktop computers with terabytes of storage will fall by the wayside. After all, the industry is moving that way already. Besides running software that just exists on the Web, online backup storage is already a growing business with services such as Mozy.com, Carbonite, and Box.net offering to take on the hassle of maintaining and backing up your data.

Now, even high-end graphics are moving to the cloud, with the debut of Nvidia's RealityServer 3.0 last month. Using racks of its 240-core Tesla GPU hardware programmed via Cuda software, Nvidia is claiming it can bring 3D to any computing platform that supports a browser—including netbooks and smartphones.

Up until now, the heavy-duty rendering necessary to deliver high-res images and animations has required the latest CPUs and GPUs running on a desktop or, at most, a local server. Nvidia plans to bring complex graphics apps—fluid dynamics, architectural design, 3D videogames—to computing platforms that don't have the processing power to run them locally. Nvidia, which bought Germany-based mental images at the end of 2007, is using that graphic app company's iray rendering engine to harness Tesla's parallel processing capabilities to generate photorealistic imagery.

If the technology works as advertised (and networks don't bog down with the traffic), expect the first step to be interactive, 3D web apps updated in realtime on a smartphone. The next stage? Tapping into that graphics power with a lightweight netbook to do your own high-end work.