Some people may be antsy about the consolidation of the world’s computing power into the hands of a few companies, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt sure isn’t one of them. He believes that the cost and the sophistication of the kind of enormous network supercomputer that his company is building present huge barriers to entry for would-be competitors. In a new Business Week interview, Schmidt says that becoming a giant of computing “is our goal.” He continues:

We’re doing it because the applications actually need these [supercomputer] services. A typical example is that you’re a Gmail user. Most people’s attachments are megabytes long, because they’re attaching everything plus the kitchen sink, and they’re using Gmail for transporting random bags of bits. That’s the problem of scale. But from a Google perspective, it provides significant barriers to entry against our competitors, except for the very well-funded ones. I like to think of [the data centers] as cyclotrons. There are only a few cyclotrons in physics and every one of them is important …

The interview runs alongside a long feature story about the development of Google and IBM’s education initiative to train students in the operation of massively parallel computing grids like Google’s. The article quotes a Yahoo executive as saying that the consolidation of computing has, in effect, already happened:

“In a sense,” says Yahoo Research Chief Prabhakar Raghavan, “there are only five computers on earth.” He lists Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. Few others, he says, can turn electricity into computing power with comparable efficiency.

That seems a little premature – and hubristic – to me. At the very least, I seriously doubt that all the world’s supercomputers will end up in the hands of US corporations.

The article also includes an interesting, if ambiguous, passage in which Eric Schmidt implies that Google will rent out its supercomputer to outside developers and businesses the way that Amazon.com does through Amazon Web Services:

In the past year, Amazon has opened up its own networks of computers to paying customers, initiating new players, large and small, to cloud computing. Some users simply park their massive databases with Amazon. Others use Amazon’s computers to mine data or create Web services …

For clouds to reach their potential, they should be nearly as easy to program and navigate as the Web. This, say analysts, should open up growing markets for cloud search and software tools—a natural business for Google and its competitors. Schmidt won’t say how much of its own capacity Google will offer to outsiders, or under what conditions or at what prices. “Typically, we like to start with free,” he says, adding that power users “should probably bear some of the costs.” And how big will these clouds grow? “There’s no limit,” Schmidt says. As this strategy unfolds, more people are starting to see that Google is poised to become a dominant force in the next stage of computing. “Google aspires to be a large portion of the cloud, or a cloud that you would interact with every day,” the CEO says.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Google get into the pure utility computing business, but it would certainly accelerate the development of the computing-on-demand industry immensely, adding to its legitimacy and drawing in other big players.

UPDATE: Amazon isn’t sitting still. Om Malik reports that it has just added a database service, SimpleDB (currently in beta), to its set of web computing services. Says Amazon:

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database – real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data – without the operational complexity. Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a simple API for storage and access. This eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon’s proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

Here are more details from Information Week.