Defining Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing views the whole group of machines as a single computational machine. It splits up work symmetrically and asymmetrically to the group. Often, cloud computing uses address space to perform computation, e.g. Google's Map-Reduce would use address space to help sort. This leverages the best hardware (routers) to do the information routing. It leaves the hardware optimized for storage (local hard disks).

In Cloud Computing, configuration is significant. You array the machines in a replacable manner. But the arrays are setup for speed, storage, and networking.

This could be a renaming and elaboration on grid computing which views computational cycles as a resource much like the electrical grid. Grid computing sells the grid resources. It doesn't configure the networking. Some grids like Seti@Home have significant network constraints which make it impossible to use for all but the smallest Map-Reduce problems. Cloud computing is free of the constraints of Seti@Home's node's bandwidth limitations.

Variably Long Instruction Word

With Intel pushing thousands of cores in the future, the predominant programming model may be Variably Long Instruction Words. The "instruction" would line up various "cores" together. As you start the functionality, the inputs are probably pretty small. As processing increases, the inputs are expanded to a very long data width. All the processing occurs in parallel and is slowly gathered together into the result.

This is what's used by carry-look-ahead addition if you look at the width of the number of gates used mid-computation.