Nicholas Carr, a notorious writer in the technology world for his brazen views about the future of the IT industry, writes about an IBM white paper describing Project Kittyhawk.
The white paper, uncovered by The Register, a Britain-based technology Web site, describes the project as an earnest attempt to build a “global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application.”
IBM essentially wants to be able to use Blue Gene supercomputing technology to build a uniform, universal, and global infrastructure capable of housing the entire Internet, as opposed to the disparate clusters of computers companies rely on now.
That could hold up Mr. Carr’s thesis in his book, The Big Switch, that information technology will eventually become a public utility. That’s all speculation, however — it still leaves the question of who’s manning the cord after the “Monolothic Internet” is complete. —Hurley Goodall
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