Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

While I sip my morning coffee, I’m using a computer that is somewhere else, run by someone else, and paid for my someone else.

I am taking a data science course online. As part of the course, I have some weeks of limited, free time on a machine leaning platform that is “in the cloud,” i.e., in a data center somewhere.

I sit in front of my puny 11″ screen adjusting the coefficients on a machine learning algorithm (sounds much more impressive than it is). I hit the enter key, and viola, magic happens somewhere.

I’m not paying for this computing time. Someone is, someone has to be, someone must be, but it isn’t me. What is happening here in the 21st century?

Oh, by the way. One of the limitations is that I can only submit three runs per day. That takes me back to the days of punch cards, computing I/O rooms, and turnaround that is so slow that I could only run three programs a day.

Well, maybe this clouded supercomputing century isn’t all that it is made to be?