Should data be crunched at the centre or at the edge?

ONCE A YEAR the computing cloud touches down in Las Vegas. In early December tens of thousands of mostly male geeks descend on America’s gambling capital in hope not of winnings but of wisdom about Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s biggest cloud-computing provider. Last year they had the choice of more than 2,500 different sessions over a week at the shindig, which was called “Re:Invent”. The high point was the keynote featuring AWS’s latest offerings by Andy Jassy, the firm’s indefatigable boss, who paced the stage for nearly three hours.

But those who dare to walk the long city blocks of Las Vegas to the conference venues can connect to the cloud, and thus the mirror worlds, in another way. Push a button to request a green light at one of thousands of intersections and this will trigger software from SWIM.AI, a startup, to perform a series of calculations that may influence the traffic flow in the entire city. These intersections do not exist just in the physical realm, but live in the form of digital twins in a data centre. Each takes in information from its environment—not just button-pushing pedestrians, but every car crossing a loop in the road and every light change—and continually predicts what its traffic lights will do two minutes ahead of time. Ride-hailing firms such as Uber, among others, can then feed these predictions into their systems to optimise driving routes.