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A detailed foray into the material and spatial realities of cloud computing

Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Ali Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.

Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses, Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the growing economies of data extraction.

Breaking down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.

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New technologies and standards are emerging which will have a dramatic effect on the design and implementation of future industrial control systems. PLCs and PC-based soft controllers are beginning to use software components, for example function blocks, to business systems. New tools and techniques are needed to design and model these systems, such as UML and modern fieldbus technology. The IEC 61499 standard has been developed specifically to model distributed control systems. Practical tools based on IEC 61499 are likely to emerge soon to model, validate and simulate the behaviour of complex networks of function blocks and it is expected that this standard will become key to highly-developed distributed systems.

The needs of future digital data and computer systems are expected to be two to three orders of magnitude larger than for today's systems, to take account of unprecedented amounts of heterogeneous hardware, lines of source code, numbers of users, and volumes of data. Ultrascale computing systems (UCS) are a solution. Envisioned as large-scale complex systems joining parallel and distributed computing systems, which can be located at multiple sites and cooperate to provide the required resources and performance to the users, these technologies will extend individual systems to provide the resources that are very much needed.