Utility computing’s next frontier: vertical clouds

A whole new ecosystem has grown up around Amazon’s utility computing platform, with the constant release of new applications and hosted services that use it. As utility computing eveolves, it’s natural for technology to fork from general putpose to more speicalized platforms, and this has begun to happen.

Now that businesses and vendors are growing more comfortable with the pools of virtualized computing resources, it makes sense to start talking about what — other than the next great startup — can work on clouds. Combine this willingness to explore the cloud with the rise of general purpose computing on the graphics processor and you get the type of specialty cloud that AMD and its partner Otoy (makes software to access the graphics cloud) are building.

Jules Urbach, CEO of Otoy, tells me a GPU-based cloud could be used for gaming, creating virtual Blu-ray players and even transcoding. There seems to be demand for such clouds (I’ve heard folks in the movie industry talk about a desire for transcoding clouds) and Sun Microsystems executives have championed the idea of different hardware underlying different clouds. Yet, the idea is still a bit controversial, possibly because it’s hard to imagine achieving commodity pricing for specialty clouds. (Gigaom)

With declining hardware and bandwidth costs and increased price competition we could see big iron tools like Dreamworks quality render farms at the disposal of the individual with only a few coins in his pocket.  We’ll see home grown enterprise developing products that require big iron processing power to design with the possibility of build to order manufacturing just around the corner. Recession may delay this, but it may also accerate it.