The first stage is the emergence of computers. The emergence of computers is one of the major scientific and technological achievements in the 20th century. Its rapid development has greatly promoted the development of knowledge economy and the process of social informatization, and caused profound changes in society. As far as calculation methods are concerned, electronic computers have gone through three stages: centralized calculation, decentralized calculation and network calculation. 1946 In February, the world's first electronic computer ENIAC was successfully developed at the University of Pennsylvania, which was mainly used to calculate trajectory and develop hydrogen bombs. 1952 IBM's first mainframe IBM7(I 1) for scientific computing came out. In the 20 years after its birth, computers were mainly mainframes, and all calculations were completed by centralized operation of mainframes. Specialized programmers are responsible for programming, and specialized recording personnel are responsible for input and output. Users interact with host applications through a "dumb terminal" with only one screen, one keyboard and one host connection line. Because the terminal has no processing power, everything depends on the host, including the terminal display. The operation at this stage is characterized by centralized calculation by the host computer, which is mainly used in large scientific research institutions.
198 1 02 August 12, IBM officially launched the world's first personal computer-IBM PC, which uses Intel 8088 emblem processor, the main processor is 4.77 MH', and runs the MS-DOS operating system specially developed by Microsoft for IBM PC. From then on, people can use their own emblem computer to calculate independently. With the emergence of personal computers, computers are rapidly applied to all walks of life in society. This stage is characterized by personal computer distributed computing, but it is mostly used in production and scientific research, and rarely used in family life.
Since then, the development of computers has been shrinking in size and improving in performance. It has gone through several stages: electron tube, transistor, integrated circuit, large-scale and ultra-large-scale integrated circuit. 1April, 1965 19, Gordon Moore, then director of the R&D laboratory of Fairchild Semiconductor Company, put forward R's famous Moore's Law: the number of transistors that can hold' nano' on an IC will double with each It increase. In June, the performance doubled and the cost remained unchanged. According to the statistics released by Intel, the number of transistors on a single chip has increased from 2,300 on a 40X "processor with 65,438+0,976,5438+0 to 7. 5 million on Pentium processors with 65,438+0,997, an increase of 3,200 times in 26 years. This famous law has created a myth in the IT field and dominated the development of electronic information industry for more than half a century. The first computer, ENIAC, can perform 5,000 blanket operations and 5,000 multiplication operations per second. In 2009, Dawning (PHPC 100), the first personal high-performance computer developed in China, has a maximum operation speed of 250 billion operations per second.
The second stage is the emergence of the network. The appearance of network and the rapid development of PC technology connect PCs scattered all over the world, making computers the main tool for information acquisition and exchange, and making all aspects of human society closely related to the Internet: from important national infrastructure such as finance, transportation, communication, electricity and energy, to key military facilities such as satellites, airplanes and aircraft carriers, and then to education, commerce and culture closely related to people's lives.
1969.ARPANET is the first packet-switched experimental network in the world, which was established with the support of ARPA of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense and connected with four universities in relevant countries. 1980, TCP/IP protocol was successfully developed. 1986, Guo Yao established ra at' 1 and the main subnet M 1SFNET with CP/IP technology, which connected several supercomputing centers, universities and research institutes in the United States to Hunan, and the world's first Internet came into being, which was quickly connected to all parts of the world. In 1990s, with the appearance of Web technology and corresponding browsers, the development and application of the Internet made a new leap. 1995, NSFNFT started commercial operation.
Internet makes the speed and scale of information collection and dissemination reach an unprecedented level, and realizes information sharing and interaction. However, the following problems are: information explosion, information flooding. In the past 30 years, human beings have produced more information than the sum of information production in the past 1 0,000 years. According to an American research report "Economic Tightening and Digital Universe Expanding", the digital information created globally in 2008 was about 3.9 x 1 [] u bits. If all the books are printed and arranged in a row, the length of' already' will be 10 times of the distance from the earth to Pluto.
Since 1995, with the continuous maturity of network technology, increasing bandwidth and increasing network services, the number of netizens has shown an exponential growth trend. According to the 25th China Internet Development Report (I 1) issued by China Internet Network Information Center (CNC), by the end of February 2009, the number of netizens in China had reached 384 million, and the Internet penetration rate reached 28.9%. QQ, chat room BBS, e-mail, search engine, blog, online games, etc. Has become an important part of people's lives. It is worth mentioning that online shopping is on the rise year by year, which has a very important impact on the business model of human sacrifice. China Online Shopping Market Research Report released by CNN IC in 2009 shows that as of June 2009, there were 87.88 million online shopping users in China, an increase of 24.59 million, with an annual growth rate of 8.9%. In the first half of 2009, the total online shopping consumption in China was119.52 billion yuan. Netizens spent 10637 billion and131500 million on Cto C and Bto C martyrdom websites, respectively, and the shopping expenses on C-C shopping websites for half a year accounted for 89% of the total online shopping.
In addition, people also get information online through mobile phones and other communication tools. According to the 25th Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet and the Survey Report on 3G Users of China Mobile Communication Network in 2009, by the end of February 2009, the number of mobile phone users in China had increased rapidly, reaching 233 million, accounting for 60.8% of the total number of netizens, with an annual increase of 654.38+0.2 billion. The trend of Internet portability is obvious. Mobile news, mobile chat and mobile search are in the top three, with 90.8%, 47.9% and 46.9% users respectively. According to the statistics of CDG and U 1 1T5 forum, as of February 2009, the number of 3G users in the world has exceeded 810 million, which means that the global commercialization of 3G is accelerating. In 2009, China entered the 3C era. The reorganization of domestic operators, the issuance of 3G licenses, the continuous updating of technology and the continuous increase of bandwidth have intensified the competition among operators. A variety of powerful terminal products and application services are constantly introduced, such as mobile email, mobile phone search, mobile phone positioning, mobile phone games, mobile phone music and other services, so that many applications originally based on PC can now be realized in mobile R, greatly expanding people's working space. The architecture of cloud system is not complicated, and it is mainly composed of cloud computing and cloud storage. Cloud computing generally refers to distributed computing, in which computer server clusters are established in data centers all over the country to provide users with different applications through the network; The same is true for cloud storage, which stores user data in the cloud and avoids using local resources for storage, so as to achieve the purpose of using and storing in different places.
Cloud system is composed of software, hardware and security components, which has the advantages of high cost performance, safety and stability, long service life, strong functions, high manageability and easy maintenance, and can help multi-computer users achieve the most efficient computer application effect with the lowest investment.
Cloud computing operating system usually includes the following modules: large-scale basic software and hardware management, virtual computing management, distributed file system, business/resource scheduling management, security management control and so on. The information in the cloud is very free. For example, if you are in a company, you can copy data from other clouds at any time to complete your work. When you go to the mall, you can check the latest product information and discount activities from the cloud of the mall at will. And so on, these functions actually depend on the cloud server system.
Cloud security is very high, including regional cloud lock technology, public fingerprint, iris and so on. Looking at IT vendors at home and abroad, it seems that most of them have no such ambitions except Inspur and Huawei, who have stated that they want to develop a cloud operating system, and VMware, which promotes its vSphere as a cloud operating system. But another interesting phenomenon is that in recent years, server vendors, storage vendors and network vendors have launched various cloud management platforms called "cloud infrastructure management platform" and "cloud management platform". And from the propaganda point of view, the cloud management platform can also realize the management and scheduling of various resources in the data center. People can't help asking, what is the relationship between cloud management platform and cloud operating system?
A senior engineer of Red Hat Company, who asked not to be named, said that the "cloud operating system" and cloud management platform proposed by some IT vendors are often just a management tool of "Hypervisor+ virtual resources", and some even provide certain API interfaces to realize centralized management. To be precise, it should be a "manageable virtualization platform". This is far from what an open and universal cloud operating system needs to achieve. Of course, it is much more difficult to develop a cloud operating system.
When it comes to the difficulties in research and development, Goddata thinks that there are mainly the following points.
First, large-scale software and hardware resource management. "This resource should theoretically include various heterogeneous resources in data centers such as computing, storage, and networking, but in fact, not many can do this." Goddata said.
"Because the scope of this resource is actually very extensive." Goddata explained, "Taking computing resources as an example, it should include not only virtual machines (virtual servers), but also real machines (servers without virtualization); Real machines include not only x86 servers, but also minicomputers from IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle Bone Inscriptions. In terms of virtual machines, it includes not only VMware virtual machines, but also other kinds of virtual machines, such as Microsoft and Xen, and it also needs to be able to schedule resources between data centers scattered in different locations. Therefore, many manufacturers will not call their products cloud operating systems because they know that their products have not reached this level. "
Goddata's point of view is a bit harsh, but it is also true. At present, some cloud management platforms only support homogeneous environment, while others can only manage pure virtual environment. Although some are better for managing non-virtual environments, they still have limitations. For example, Zhou Yiping, Chief Technology Officer of Fujitsu China, admits that although its ROR cloud infrastructure management platform can manage "virtual machines and real machines", this "real machine" is limited to Fujitsu's own physical servers.
The second is based on distributed structure. Through the fully distributed structure, it can expand from thousands of servers to millions of servers, thus building massive computing power and massive storage capacity. And the failure of a single node will not affect the reliability of the system.
In addition, Inspur and Huawei also put special emphasis on distributed storage, because the traditional "cloud computing" platform based on virtualization technology can realize virtual machine migration, fault tolerance and other functions, but generally rely on * * * to enjoy storage. This has a fatal hidden danger, that is, once the * * * shared storage goes down, all virtual machines built on the * * * shared storage will go down. In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to build a cloud computing platform on the distributed storage system to realize data redundancy. The distributed file system based on block devices has become the basis of building a cloud operating system.
Although the real cloud operating system has not appeared due to some technical or commercial difficulties, an open and universal cloud operating system should be an important cornerstone of cloud computing and the future technical development direction.