Should data be crunched at the centre or at the edge?
The computing cloud touches down in Las Vegas. In early December tens of thousands of mostly male geeks descend on America’s gambling capital in hope not of winnings but of wisdom about Amazon Web Services (), the world’s biggest cloud-computing provider. Last year they had the choice of more than 2,500 different sessions over a week at the shindig, which was called “Re:Invent”. The high point was the keynote featuring ’s latest offerings by Andy Jassy, the firm’s indefatigable boss, who paced the stage for nearly three hours.
But those who dare to walk the long city blocks of Las Vegas to the conference venues can connect to the cloud, and thus the mirror worlds, in another way. Push a button to request a green light at one of thousands of intersections and this will trigger software from , a startup, to perform a series of calculations that may influence the traffic flow in the entire city. These intersections do not exist just in the physical realm, but live in the form of digital twins in a data centre. Each takes in information from its environment—not just button-pushing pedestrians, but every car crossing a loop in the road and every light change—and continually predicts what its traffic lights will do two minutes ahead of time. Ride-hailing firms such as Uber, among others, can then feed these predictions into their systems to optimise driving routes.
represents a centralised model where all the data are collected and crunched in a few places, namely big data centres. , on the other hand, is an example of what is being called “edge computing”: the data are processed in real time as close as possible to where they are collected. It is between these two poles that the infrastructure of the data economy will stretch. It will be, to quote a metaphor first used by Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute, very much like the root system of an aspen tree. For every tree above the ground, there are miles and miles of interconnected roots underground, which also connect to the roots of other trees. Similarly, for every warehouse-sized data centre, there will be an endless network of cables and connections, collecting data from every nook and cranny of the world.
To grasp how all this may work, consider the origin and journey of a typical bit and how both will change in the years to come. Today the bit is often still created by a human clicking on a website or tapping on a smartphone. Tomorrow it will more often than not be generated by machines, collectively called the “Internet of Things” (): cranes, cars, washing machines, eyeglasses and so on. And these devices will not only serve as sensors, but act on the world in which they are embedded.
Ericsson, a maker of network gear, predicts that the number of devices will reach 25bn by 2025, up from 11bn in 2019. Such an estimate may sound self-serving, but this explosion is the likely outcome of a big shift in how data is collected. Currently, many devices are tethered by cable. Increasingly, they will be connected wirelessly. 5, the next generation of mobile technology, is designed to support 1m connections per square kilometre, meaning that in Manhattan alone there could be 60m connections. Ericsson estimates that mobile networks will carry 160 exabytes of data globally each month by 2025, four times the current amount.
