November 02, 2009 This article is excerpted from "Cloud
Opportunities in HPC: Market Taxonomy," published by
InterSect360 Research. The full article was distributed to
subscribers of the InterSect360 market advisory service and can
also be obtained by contacting email@example.com. In Life, the
Universe, and Everything, the third book of Douglas Adams'
whimsical Hitchhiker fantasy trilogy, cosmic wayfarer Ford
Prefect describes how an object, even a large object, could
effectively be rendered invisible to the general populace by
surrounding it with an "SEP field" that causes would-be
observers to avoid recognizing Somebody Else's Problem. "An
SEP," Ford helpfully explains, "is something we can't see, or
don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think
that it's somebody else's problem." If we were to reinterpret
SEP to stand for "Somebody Else's Processing," we would be well
on the way to a definition of cloud computing. The term "cloud"
comes from the engineering practice of drawing a cloud in a s