Heterogeneous Cloud Computing: The Way Forward

Cloud computing developers face multiple challenges in adapting systems and applications for increasingly heterogeneous datacenter architectures. A major appeal of cloud computing is that it abstracts hardware architecture from both end users and programmers. This abstraction allows underlying infrastructure to be scaled up or improved-for example, by adding datacenter servers or upgrading to newer hardware-without forcing changes in applications. The long-dominant x86 processor architecture, along with high-level, portable languages such as Java, PHP, Python, and SQL, has helped assure the continued viability of such abstraction. Meanwhile, exponential growth in microprocessor capability, mirroring Moore´s law, has helped to improve performance for most applications that execute on general-purpose processors, including those deployed on clouds.