The GoPC Blog

The problem with being a perfectionist is that one doesn’t want to mention anything until the pie is completely cooked, taste tested, and absolutely ready for presentation.  The problem with Internet technology is that it’s never finished . . .    But after years of refusing to announce anything until its actually running, I’ve agreed to put out this bulletin of what we’ve got coming down the line, just before it actually goes live.

I created GoPC in 1995 and we are now many generations of GoPC technology further down the path.  The complexity in each new release grows exponentially.  What becomes simpler and more useful for the customer requires a massive effort, discipline and very deep structured thinking on the part of the developers.   I want to say that the GoPC team is the most intelligent, committed and brilliant team of people that I’ve ever worked with.   It’s these guys and gals who have created the most incredible advances in GoPC for this upcoming release.

A special acknowledgement is also due to the remarkable people who create and contribute to Open Source, the thousands of developers who are responsible for the applications we’re able to provide via GoPC’s  supercomputing framework at no cost to our customers.  It’s our goal to add value to the work of these peoples by making their products much more available to a much broader audience.

The upgrade we’re about to undertake is a Major rework of the whole supercomputer.  It’s new hardware and systems (approximately 100 separate servers not counting the expandable front-end nodes which carry the bulk of our processing load), new network infrastructure, the latest application versions on the desktop and a host of new very cool technologies.  We have always made extensive use of virtualisation, and there is far more fail-over capability than ever before.

One of the most exciting advances from the new system is our ability now to fragment the supercomputer into separate pieces and distribute these geographically.  This upcoming version of GoPC will become a distributed supercomputer with a footprint on each continent, all managed centrally.  Changes and upgrades are automatically reflected across the entire infrastructure - thus effectively creating one global footprint.   For customers who currently experience high levels of latency to the GoPC supercomputer in Australia (particularly users in Europe, Africa and Middle East where Internet routes go via the USA and can often exceed 400ms) this will have a dramatic improvement on screen responsiveness.   We are currently negotiating with interested parties for financing and partnership involvement to achieve this quickly.   Technically it is now about 10x easier than it was last year.

The new GoPC will give more granular control allowing us to tailor solutions for specific customer groups.  Our premium enterprise customers and perhaps others will have the power to tailor their own solutions.  For example they may choose from a simple pick list which applications their organisation will have; select  another layer of data encryption technology on disk, add and remove users daily, select more server side storage, or recover a selected file from a last months backup straight from a window on the desktop.   Godrive (GoPC’s online Drive) will seamlessly integrate with local PC desktop and you’ll be amazed at how fast this operates.

We have had countless requests since first going live in Dec 2004 with our open source version of GoPC, for a command prompt, for shell access and for the ability for people to install their own applications.  This will soon become available and we will also allow customers to operate a complete virtual Linux desktop instance in their own virtual data centre.

This major upgrade crystallizes about 16 months of Research and Development by our team.  Because of the scale of it, it has taken several months to migrate customers data and prepare everything for the big bang cutover.   GoPC has run at 99.999% uptime since going live in Dec 2004, the only complete outages we’ve had was when we physically moved the data centre. At each upgrade  we’ve only ever taken down part of the system at a time.   We’re anxious about the change over because there are likely to be teething issues in areas which we could not have foreseen.   But we have to move forward and we will be doing everything we can to ensure that any issues that surface are resolved as speedily as possible.   Once we’ve switched over to the new system we plan to wait a few weeks to ensure things have stabilise and then start rolling out these new solutions which we’ve been wanting to bring to the customers.

Oh, I almost forgot to say, that everything will be running a lot faster.   New customer sign-ups which currently are taking up 4-5 minutes, should reduce to around 30-40 seconds.  The new GoPC works like lightning.  We hope you’ll like it.

The ETA is any day now.

Graeme Speak
CEO / Founder

Recently we have released a major upgrade of GoPC.

All of the great applications in GoPC have been upgraded to the latest releases. Most notable are Firefox 3 and Open Office 3, plus there is plenty more there as well with new tools for project management, graphic design and more.

GoPC gives you Open Office 3 and much more

The upgrade process has already commenced, and to ensure the upgrade is triggered for you if you are an existing customer, please log into GoPC via the www.GoPC.net website. If you have any trouble logging in, please try recovering your password from the website (which helps to reset the account) and try again which should resolve the issue. Our helpful support team are on standby to help you with any questions.

The new flavor of the GoPC desktop is sitting upon new supercomputer infrastructure. This translates to a faster experience for you, but also means we can accommodate and ride the wave of rapid growth in cloud computing.

Please provide a comment below if there are other applications you think should be added to GoPC, or your feedback on the new release. Your feedback helps us to make GoPC better for you.

Our latest release of GoPC is being made available to our clients now. It sits on new supercomputer infrastructure within our datacenter.

Our latest release of GoPC has been developed with a view to being able to rapidly roll out and scale GoPC to millions of users around the world. In order to do that, and to ensure we can respond to spikes in growth, we needed to develop our implementation of GoPC such that we can duplicate our Perth datacenter infrastructure incredibly quickly.

It also provides new capability for us to be able to customize our offering and provide greater flexibility to customers as well. This means we have more flexibility going forward which will mean we can customise solutions for particular markets.

Our customers will notice more speed. GoPC is already fast, but our new release makes it even faster.

In addition, new and updated applications have been added to the GoPC desktop. For those people who haven’t looked at GoPC before or not for some months, it is well worth trying GoPC either as a replacement to your current desktop software solution, or to compliment and provide a mobile solution to your existing desktop software.

GoPC is really starting to make a move worldwide and are in discussions with major partners to provide similar supercomputer infrastructure around the world including Africa, Asia, India, North America and Europe. So, this will be great for people who are after a fast cloud computing solution.

We hope you are as excited about our new release of GoPC as we are, stay tuned for more developments…

GoPC has entered into a strategic alliance with ThinLinX, the developer of a $99USD computer called the Hot-E.

The Hot-E received world wide publicity this month on at least 30 media outlets from the NY Times through to Australian Television.  The device is designed for cloud computing where all processing occurs on central servers.   This is an exact fit for use with GoPC and uses a staggering 3 watts of power compared to a normal 300 watt in an average PC. It will cost just $99US.   ThinLinX has also just partnered with a “major global IT company” and an announcement about this will appear soon.

John Nichols, CEO of ThinLinX and Graeme Speak, CEO of GoPC have agreed that a strategic alliance between the two companies makes a perfect match and a golden opportunity for synergy. Both are complementary Australian designed technologies which have now been launched on the world stage.

Powerpoint presentation using Impress

This month at an investor forum in Silicon Valley,  50 companies were invited to deliver their elevator pitches to the Silicon Valley Bank, VC’s and Angel investors.  GoPC was selected in the top 3 finalists, offered feedback and asked to re-present.  Of the top three, the venture capitalists selected us as the number 2 most interesting and well presented pitch.

Of course we were absolutely delighted. But in one sense we were not that surprised - we believe it underscores the huge interest and recognition in Silicon Valley about cloud computing.  It also demonstrates GoPC is definitely in the top echelon of projects currently in Silicon Valley.

There were three - count ‘em - three seminar/conferences held in June 2008 entitled Cloud Computing.  As a concept, it’s certainly picking up steam as ‘the new,’ and the world seems to be starting to understand that it will be moving towards using Cloud Computing, particularly at the enterprise level. Tonight I went to a VLAB (MIT/Stanford Venture Lab) for a conference on “Cloud Computing:  creating value for Web 2.0 Apps.”

I was surprised and pretty proud to find, of a room of 300+ people, and seven speakers, that we at GoPC really have got a strong handle on what cloud computing is, how it works, and what it can do.  I was actually disappointed that I didn’t learn much new - but heartened to find out that we know a great deal more than many.

Google, Amazon, etc. know a lot about their implementation of it.  Many other providers, coat-tail riders and bandwagon jumpers are really still trying to get their heads around it.

95% of the discussion related to just the network infrastructure level; that is, using Xen or VMWare to virtualise servers and people like Amazon with the S3 architecture renting out virtual servers - all this is at the data center infrastructure level.  There was hardly any discussion of the Cloud at the application layer, and certainly not at the presentation layer.

Not to toot my own whistle, but we’ve been using Xen and other technology to make good use of servers at that level, but the real magic is that we’ve created a fully integrated cloud at the application layer and presentation layer.  Nobody else has done this anywhere.  By comparison (against what I saw today), we’ve got the most comprehensive example of a fully integrated cloud computing environment going. Not too shabby.

I’m guessing it’s actually a matter of ‘who cares?’ Although some purists might gnash their teeth to hear that!

But if I had to answer it, I’d say it’s not actually a question of what came first. It’s more a question of which is a subset of which.

In my opinion, grid computing is a kind or subset of cloud computing. Grid computing is scalable (that is, make it big or small according to your needs) computing power, usually used by businesses. And supplied via the web.

It’s a way of tapping into extra computing power in ‘times of need.’ Say you need to do a mass mailout of a large document once a month (think: a pdf newsletter). Just tap into the power of someone else’s grid for the day and off it goes in the blink of an eye – rather than tying up your servers for the next 12 hours. Of course you pay for it. AAmazon Elastic Cloud Compute offers this service (although they seem to be hijacking the name cloud computing), as does GoGrid (who are, btw, not affiliated with GoPC).

All very interesting, but how does this relate to cloud computing?

Some would have you believe that cloud computing is either a fancy name for, or a part of, grid computing. Others go into infinite detail to categorise various providers WITHIN the cloud computing realm. (Actually, we think cloud computing encompasses grid computing, but that’s beside the point.)

This is because cloud computing as a term is still up for grabs. Purists can argue until they’re blue in the face, but the fact is that cloud computing will encompass whatever the people say it encompasses. Whatever works best and hits the market first and touches the public heart in the most widespread manner.

Best to keep definitions broad, then. Cloud computing is computing power offered via the web - something you can tap into without knowing or caring how it works. You just want to know THAT it works. And therein lies the principle of cloud computing.

Services, platforms, power, apps, hosting, etc you can pick out of the cloud that is the internet. A cloud is fuzzy, misty, obscure and opaque - but that’s okay because it’s not about how or why it works. It only matters that it works and you can access it anywhere, anytime.

Cloud computing is a method of supplying technology on demand. Who cares where it comes from, or even what it’s called? So long as it’s there when you need it. That’s why services as basic as web-based email are also forms of cloud computing. It’s just that, as the services expand, we are now finding it necessary to have a name for this stuff. And just in time, because the expansion it’s undergoing is nothing short of phenomenal.

Graeme