Technology Trends

The Human markup language (HumanML) is a new specification developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) — and also our new acronym for this week. One of its goals is to improve human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications. This long article from DM Review, which covers business intelligence and data mining, says that this new markup language can be the basis for tools helping us mining massive volumes of textual and multimedia content. In fact, HumanML wants to represent human characteristics (cultural, physical, psychological, etc.) in such a formal way it can be delivered as machine readable subtext via the use of extensible markup language (XML). Read more…

Here is a short introduction to HumanML.

This article is intended to expound upon a vision for how HumanML may play a role in doing so and how it may be applied in the government and private sectors to improve overall collaboration. Focusing on what functional niches HumanML may fill, this article will hopefully provide context of vision for those already steeped in advancing IT state of the art and are already well versed in the underlying foundations, upon which HumanML is being constructed.

Before going further, let me warn you about its — somewhat — marketing tone.

HumanML is focused precisely on facilitating the key human abilities needed to deal with the challenges brought on by the times - to share, collaborate and relate. As an open standard, HumanML is aimed at helping to sort through mountains of textual and multi-media material by providing for inclusion of human related contextual clues such as the authors’ and publishers’ intent in the form of standardized document markup. Providing a standardized means to convey and establish contextual meaning is intended to allow authors a chance to rise above the chaos described below and permit researchers more opportunity to timely pull valuable nuggets of information and knowledge out of that same chaos.

According to the author, both governmental and non-governmental areas can benefit from HumanML. In the first sector, this new HumanML specification could ease interoperability across agencies and departments at all levels of government.

And for the industry, HumanML could be a basis for helping people to locate the specific information and knowledge they are looking for — especially on the Net.

By providing a standardized means to convey and establish contextual meaning, the use of HumanML would provide authors a chance to rise above the noise floor in the chaos of the Internet. At the same time, such use would offer researchers richer means to separate the wheat from the chaff to find the valuable nuggets of information and knowledge they need.

Finally, here is the last paragraph of the article.

By enriching communication, employment of HumanML would aid understanding even across intra-cultural lingo and multi-media context barriers while, at the same time, permitting deep interoperable access to the material for knowledge mining and other forms of automated services.

Isn’t ironic that the author uses the word ‘lingo’?

Source: Jay Peltz, for DM Direct Newsletter, July 29, 2005

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The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is one of the largest genomics data centers in the world. In “The Hum and the Genome,” the Scientist writes about the IT infrastructure needed to handle the avalanche of data that researchers have to analyze. With its 2,000 processors and its 300 terabytes of storage, the data center uses today about 0.75 megawatts (MW) of power at a cost of €140,000 per year (about $170K). But the data center will need more than a petabyte of storage within three years, and its yearly electricity bill will reach €500,000 (more than $600K) for about 1.4 MW, enough to power more than a thousand homes. Read more…

Below is a small diagram showing the current IT infrastructure of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, used by the Human Genome Project (Credit: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute).

Here is a link to a larger version of this chart.

Now, let’s look at this IT infrastructure in detail.

• Computers




• Today: The datacenter hosts about 2,000 Alpha processors, originally designed by Digital Equipment (DEC), before its acquisition by Compaq, and later by Hewlett-Packard (HP).


• Tomorrow: The Sanger Institute is looking at cheaper solutions, especially now that HP has officially stopped any development on the Alpha front.


• Storage




• Today: Three different computer rooms have a total capacity of about 300 terabytes.


• Tomorrow: The IT management forecasts about a petabyte within three years — at least.


• Databases




• Today: There are about 40 different databases, and only two of them are in the 50 terabytes area.


• Tomorrow: One of the databases, the Trace sequence archive currently contains about 700 million entries, and it doubles every 10 months.


• Power bills




• Today: The current equipment needs about 0.75 megawatts for a cost of €140,000 per year (about $170K).


• Tomorrow: The new setup will need about 1.4 megawatts, which will raise the yearly bill to about €500,000 (about $615K today).

The supercomputer vendors can say all they want about diminishing costs. But they almost never talk about the power bills…

Sources: Stuart Blackman, The Scientist, Volume 19, Issue 11, Page 15, June 6, 2005; and various websites

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The U.S. Army is increasingly using battlefield sensors these days, from static ones which detect ground movements to unmanned aerial drones. This means that field commanders are overwhelmed by too much information. So the military started the BrUte Force Fusion (BUFF) program, which uses server and visualization systems from SGI, according to Military Information Technology. In a lab located at Fort Huachuca, AZ, BUFF analyses 170,000 hourly intelligence reports or about 3 terabytes of data each day. The goal of the BUFF program is to reach the Level II of the data fusion hierarchy — Level I occurs when a sensor is able to detect the movement of an object in a battle space while Level II blends data from multiple sensors. Many scientists believe that reaching Level II will take two decades, but promoters of the BUFF program think they can do better. Read more…

Here is the introduction of the article from Military Information Technology.

The Battle Command Battle Lab at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, is evaluating ways to fuse intelligence data from multiple sources into a cohesive combat picture in order to put more complete and actionable battlefield knowledge in the hands of field commanders. Experts there are using a variety of advanced technologies, including new server and visualization systems from Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI).

The new systems are deployed as part of the military’s Brute Force Fusion (BUFF) program, which is evaluating methods for achieving a clear understanding of current battlefield conditions. BUFF is focused on what is known as Level II fusion, which merges data from a growing array of intelligence sensors to create a picture of what is happening on the battlefield now.

With some 170,000 hourly intelligence reports generating three terabytes of data a day, BUFF’s research is also focused on assembling the data into actionable intelligence for specific field commanders or troop leaders.

In “Get BUFF,” GovExec.com gives some additional details about the program.

Jason Denno, the Battle Lab’s deputy director and a self-described “deviant” thinker, is leading the BrUte Force Fusion Program, a daring and potentially fruitless attempt to conquer the data deluge by wrestling it to the ground. (The muscular approach prompted the program’s acronym, “BUFF,” which was Denno’s idea.)

Denno hopes that, with BUFF, the military could produce level II fusion tools within the next few years. “We have a sea of information at this point,” Denno says. Buried in it, somewhere, could be the telltale clue that lets analysts know whether they’re looking at a few tanks moving across the desert, or the point of a much larger force, backed up by devastating artillery power.

Denno thinks that ‘traditional’ military analysts have not looked at enough information, probably because of a lack of computing power.

They have looked at the most current set of facts and assessed what was happening at that moment. When they have to make another assessment - probably a few minutes or a few days later — they look at the freshest data obtained since the last set.

The problem, Denno says, is analysts’ views frequently are based only on the most recent data; they might not account for historic trends. BUFF, however, would base each assessment on all the data that has been collected. Of course, that means the data set grows exponentially with each new assessment. The mound of data becomes a mountain and then a mountain range.

And here is Denno’s conclusion.

“Sometimes, you just need a sledgehammer,” Denno says of his all-or-nothing concept. “We were the first ones to use a sledgehammer instead of a pickle fork.”

For slightly different information, you also can read this SGI press release from February 15, 2005.

[Disclaimer: I worked for SGI between 1996 and 2001, but I don't have any more ties with this company.]

Sources: Harrison Donnelly, Military Information Technology, April 24, 2005; Shane Harris, GovExec.com, April 15, 2005; and various websites

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BusinessWeek’s cover story looks at the future of health care from a business point of view. And the magazine tries to answer at how high-tech can save lives and money. For BusinessWeek, ‘productivity’ in health-care declined during the 1990s, but is starting to rebound, partially because of a massive investment of about $30 billion in information technology in 2005 alone by U.S. hospitals. Not only this is saving money by better managing patients and reducing the length of their stays in hospitals, this investment is also saving lives. Lots of them! It is estimated that “hospital errors result in up to 98,000 deaths annually,” including 7,000 just by missing drug-interaction problems. Amazing numbers, isn’t? Read more…

BusinessWeek has used the example of the Hackensack University Medical Center to check if it was defining the future of health care. Here is a short description of what’s going up there.

Hackensack is one of the nation’s most aggressive tech adopters. Millions of dollars in investments have paid for projects well beyond the online drug system that tipped off Gross. Doctors can tap an internal Web site to examine X-rays from a PC anywhere. Patients can use 37-inch plasma TVs in their rooms to surf the Net for information about their medical conditions. There’s even a life-size robot, Mr. Rounder, that doctors can control from their laptops at home. They direct the digital doc, complete with white lab coat and stethoscope, into hospital rooms and use two-way video to discuss patients’ conditions.

There are currently thirty-five Mr. Rounders in hospitals in the U.S. You can rent one for $4,000 a month, or buy them for $120,000 a piece. For more information about Mr. Rounder, you can check the following resources:

• “Mr. Rounder is On-Call at Hackensack University Medical Center” (press release)
  
  
• “Meet Mr. Rounder,” an online extra article from BusinessWeek
  
  
• “Mr. Rounder Makes the Rounds,” part on an online slide show from BusinessWeek
  
  
• InTouch Health, Inc., which builds Mr. Rounder
  

Now, let’s go back at the question of the health-care future.

Hospitals such as Hackensack, along with insurers and the government, are stepping up their investments in technology. For hospitals, there’s more motivation than ever: The government and private insurers are beginning to pay hospitals more for higher-quality care — and the only way to measure quality, and then improve it, is with more information technology. Hospital spending on such gear is expected to climb to $30.5 billion next year, from $25.8 billion in 2004, according to researcher Dorenfest Group.

Investing more dollars is one thing, but how do you measure ‘improved productivity’ in health-care? One thing is to look at financial results. And investments — and commitments by all nurses and doctors — have raised Hackensack’s operating margins, to 3.1% last year from 1.2% in 2000.

But besides the business case, hospitals are here to save lives. And BusinessWeek comes up with pretty staggering numbers.

Poor information kills some 7,000 Americans each year just by missing drug-interaction problems, according to the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine. All together, hospital errors result in up to 98,000 deaths annually. Early evidence indicates that proper technology can reduce the toll. Hospitals that have begun using electronic prescription systems have seen up to 80% fewer prescription errors. And at Hackensack, patient mortality has dropped by 16% over the past four years, in part because of its digital initiatives.

Pretty impressive, don’t you think?

As this post starts to be a little bit longer, let’s jump to a couple of conclusions.

Hackensack offers clear lessons for other hospitals. Making technology pay takes time. It can be several years before the results of initiatives begin to surface. Just as important, making the technology work well takes a huge amount of effort. Hackensack’s central software system is constantly being tweaked to ensure that it’s woven into the routine of the medical staff.

Most important, doctors remain the key to hospitals’ success. Wooing them is an extremely delicate task. Only 7% of doctors actually work for hospitals. The others are essentially independent operators who are not required to do what hospital administrators want. Many are wary of gadgets that take extra time or interfere with their work. But they aren’t Luddites. Most are willing to experiment with new technology.

Please read this whole report, preferably the print edition because it will bring some money to BusinessWeek, which will be able to do more of these reports in the future. On the other hand, the online version has some extra articles. So read both.

[Final note: I'm not affiliated in any way with BusinessWeek or with any of the companies of the McGraw-Hill group, owner of BusinessWeek.]

Sources: Timothy J. Mullaney and Arlene Weintraub, BusinessWeek Magazine, Cover Story, March 28, 2005 Issue; and various websites

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In a very well-documented article, Computerworld describes the current status of building automation systems (BAS) that control heat, air conditioning or lighting and how these systems are merging with traditional IT infrastructures. Computerworld writes that they’re not enough standards in this industry and asks a fundamental question: who will administer these building networks, IT or facilities managers? Take for example Yale University which wants to connect 210 campus buildings, but also wishes “to integrate the BAS with the university’s accounting system for billing and chargeback.” Imagine the security risks involved with such an approach. Read more…

Let’s start with a an assessment of the current situation.

As building automation systems (BAS) that control heat, air conditioning, lighting and other building systems get smarter, they’re converging with traditional IT infrastructures. Emerging standards are enabling data sharing between building systems as well as with other business applications, improving efficiency and real-time control over building operating costs. Information security concerns, immature standards, the reluctance of vendors to give up proprietary technologies and ignorance among IT professionals of the convergence trend are all slowing the pace of this transformation, but it’s gathering momentum.

But who will control such networks? And are there enough standards in this industry?

Open standards are just beginning to evolve and will likely break down the silos between building systems ranging from physical security to elevator controls. And the data from those systems is likely to be shared with other business applications such as the accounting system. This will allow for more-efficient buildings as applications are developed that can capitalize on newly converged data streams and real-time access to data.

[Right now,] standardization has started from the bottom up. Proprietary cabling systems in networks that link sensors and other devices to controllers on individual floors have given way in recent years to two competing, open protocols, BACnet and LonTalk, while floor controllers are migrating onto IP backbones.

Barry Haaser, executive director of LonMark International, says LonTalk and BACnet will prevail at the device level for technical and cost reasons. Others aren’t so sure. “Instead of two guys running the IT and controls networks, why not one guy? I see IP going down to the individual device,” says Anno Scholten, chief technology officer at BAS vendor Plexus Technology Ltd. in Irving, Texas.

Let’s take the example of Yale University to see how complex can be the merge between control systems and IT infrastructure.

But sharing the IP backbone raises security concerns among network administrators. Yale University is starting a project to consolidate its BAS onto an IP network that will link 210 campus buildings, and it plans to tie the BAS into a room-scheduling system that will automatically control energy usage based on room occupancy. For security reasons, Bill Daniels, manager of systems and technologies for the university’s facilities group, has created an isolated, parallel network that’s protected by firewalls and uses nonroutable IP addresses to keep data off the Internet.

Jerry Hill, director of systems engineering at Yale, says security is paramount. “We don’t want a student to hack into our building management systems just because they can,” he says.

The problem is that Daniels wants to integrate the BAS with the university’s accounting system for billing and chargeback.

One thing is sure: I wouldn’t apply for an IT security job at Yale University. Too many nightmares…

Finally, this must-read article looks at how web technologies are used in building automation systems, such as the use of encrypted XML messages via SOAP to control heat and lights at an airport gate when needed.

Source: Robert L. Mitchell, Computerworld, March 14, 2005; and various websites

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In this long article, CIO Magazine reports that some cities, such as Indianapolis, are creating regional health information networks to share medical records between doctors and hospitals to save lives and money. In the example of Indianapolis, the “emergency rooms of the city’s five major hospital groups share patient data via an electronic medical network,” and 1,300 doctors have partial access to this network. The first goal of such networks is of course to save lives, but in the case of central Indiana, it also could save more than $500 million per year. Of course, there are many hurdles to overcome, many of them financial: finding money to fund the networks or convincing doctors to invest in new technologies. But the two biggest obstacles are human. First, less than a doctor over five is currently using electronic medical records (EMRs). And obviously, in our world where banks and payroll companies more or less routinely see some of their records leaked to the general public or even criminals, it’s a little bit scary to think about your medical records flying over not so secure networks. But read more…

Let’s focus on the Indianapolis example first.

In Indianapolis, the emergency rooms of the city’s five major hospital groups share patient data via an electronic medical network. And more than 1,300 doctors in the metropolitan area use an electronic messaging service, which is an extension of the ER system, to share laboratory results and other clinical information about their patients.

In Indianapolis, the three hospitals linked up to a pilot electronic medical network saved $26 per ER visit. And as the medical data-sharing system expands, the central Indiana region could save $562 million per year in health-care costs, says Dr. Marc Overhage, CEO of the nonprofit Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), formed to oversee that region’s data-sharing network.

Of course, it’s not that easy. You need to find money to deploy these networks, and many large departments of health or hospitals in the U.S. put their cash into other projects they think have higher priorities. And there also some local politics. Look at this example.

Doctors aren’t the only barriers to electronic information sharing. Over the past four years, those working to build Indianapolis’s medical data exchange have faced multiple roadblocks. According to Edward Koschka, CIO of the Community Health Network (a group of five hospitals in the Indianapolis area), the clinical messaging project was “doomed for failure” at three points over the past two years. The first time was when hospital CIOs met in June 2002 to talk about collaborating. “Everyone said, Wait a minute — this conflicts with my strategic plan for my hospital,” Koschka recalls. His team devoted three meetings to convincing the CIOs that they needed to collaborate on clinical messaging in order to reduce costs.

It’s also hard to convince doctors to invest money in these regional health networks.

Doctors must pay anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 to buy hardware and software and transfer their paper records to an EMR, says Dr. David Bates, chief of general medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston and a member of the organization working toward a statewide clinical data exchange in Massachusetts. Bates expects that insurers will reward doctors who share electronic records by paying them higher rates once they’ve installed the systems.

And it should be the hardest part, considering that doctors are not really using such systems today.

The biggest obstacle to medical information sharing, however, is the way that most doctors currently practice medicine. Right now, only 5 percent to 15 percent of doctors use electronic medical records (EMRs), and many physicians work in small practices with few extra resources or ties to large medical institutions. Doctors in such small practices don’t have the financial incentive to invest in the expensive hardware and software necessary to link into an electronic medical network.

But even if such medical networks are built, and save lives and money, will you trust them? Will your medical records be safe? Here is a doctor’s answer.

For Dr. Pierson in Whatcom County, the key to guaranteeing patient confidentiality is to offer patients and providers an audit trail of who has looked at the records. Under Whatcom County’s “shared care plan,” doctors and patients and their families have access to computerized records, and patients can note changes in symptoms or medications. If there is a breach in patient privacy, those responsible must be harshly punished, he says. “If someone breaches, they lose their job. There have to be significant penalties.”

So what’s your take? Do you think this kind of medical networks should expand? One personal clue: my answer is yes.

Source: Susannah Patton, CIO Magazine, March 1, 2005 Issue

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I’ve read several very interesting stories about social networking recently. In “From Contact to Contract” (neat title), Employee Management writes that many entrepreneurs and even professional recruiters are using services such as LinkedIn, Ryze.com, Spoke.com, or one of the two other dozen social networking sites to fill professional positions, even executive ones. Of course, human resources consulting firms are still also relying on more traditional tools, like their ‘real’ social networks. But in “‘Social Web’ Has Far To Go, But Much Promise,” the American Reporter is more skeptical about the usability of these social networking sites, saying that they are making contacts more difficult instead of easier. And Stowe Boyd, from Corante, concurs, by unlinking from social networking applications he subscribed to in a recent past (links to part 1 and to part 2). So what do you think about these applications? Have you ever used one? And if yes, have you seen some benefits? Read more before answering these questions…

Let’s start with the positive side, as reported by Employee Management.

“These tools take networking to the next level,” says Gerry Crispin, principal of CareerXroads, a human resources consulting firm in Kendall Park, N.J., and president of the New Jersey Metro Employment Management Association, a Society for Human Resource Management chapter. “These [sites] are no more than advanced databases that are extremely user-friendly.”

May be they are user-friendly, but are they efficient?

While the sites can be user-friendly, return-on-investment can vary. Social networking sites are best for finding passive candidates and for filling positions that are too specialized to be filled via traditional methods, users say.

Although LinkedIn boasts 1.2 million members, Crispin says fewer than 5 percent of corporate recruiters use social networking sites. The reason, he says, is partly because the sites are relatively new — most having started in the past three years — but also because it is easier to rely on traditional, familiar methods.

But recruiters are still experimenting new methods.

“The best recruiters I know say, ‘I use it some. I find people on LinkedIn, then I Google them and contact them myself,’” says Don Steiny, president of The Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy, a California-based nonprofit that studies social networking applications. “The best recruiters I know are fearless, and they’re just going to call them up.”

This long article also tells us about the dark side of social networking sites: sharing information.

“I don’t mind sharing that information with friends, but if it’s coming from a business computer, who else has access and how are they using it?” says says Susanne Wetzel, a computer science professor at The Stevens Institute for Technology in Hoboken, N.J., who specializes in computer security. “Too much of our information is floating around out there, and technology is becoming more and more sophisticated.”

Andy Oram, for the American Reporter looks less to privacy and more to ineffiencies.

I expect most members of online social networks are as inactive as I am, having tried them out and been unimpressed. For one thing, these networks are technologically rudimentary. They rely heavily on email, which is a reasonable place for a new medium to begin because it’s universal among Internet users. But how primitive email appears next to other ways of communicating! [...] Eventually, to really take off, social networks should provide alternatives to email rather than relying on it.

Second, the current offerings of social networks are imitations of things already available on the Internet: newsgroup, searches, and chat. There’s nothing here you can’t get elsewhere. The draw is not what you do on the social network, but whom you have a chance of doing it with.

This leads to the third major problem I’ve found with social networks: they make contacts more difficult instead of easier. Yes, broadcasting to friends of friends is trivially easy, so much so that I’ve tried to avoid checking my account because there’s so many irrelevant messages (often in languages I can’t read). But if I want to target someone for a specific purpose, I find it much easier to use a search engine or a private network of informal contacts than to go through the slow and unreliable process provided by the social network.

So Andy Oram is not very positive. But what do you think of Stowe Boyd, which writes in Corante that he’s totally giving up with these social networking sites? Here are some short quotes about his motivations.

I have participated in the various public social networks only passively — responding to others requests to connect, and occasionally passing along a request to connect to some contact.

I have wound up getting dozens of requests each month in the various networks by people more than two degrees away trying to reach people more than two degrees away, where I have little social capital involved, and I uniformally have been turning down those requests. In essence, these are a form of spam.

And as Boyd says, it’s not always easy to exit such a network.

I am annoyed that the SNAs [Social Networking Applications] don’t provide opt out at every juncture: please don’t involve me in requests like this, please don’t allow this person to contact me. please don’t contact me ever. The services vary widely in this regard. I was able to drop out of LinkedIn within a 24 hour period, although it does require sending a message to customer support.

I know, I’m asking you to read lots of interesting thoughts. But please do it before answering the above questions about the interest of social networking sites.

Are you using them or planning to dump them? Have they been useful for you? Have you ever fill a very long form asking for your interests? Finally, do you think these sites should be more user-friendly? Please post your comments below.

Sources: Lisa Daniel, for Employee Management, Winter 2005, Vol. 10, No. 1; Andy Oram, The American Reporter, Vol. 11, No. 2,588, February 23, 2005; Stowe Boyd, Corante, February 24 and February 28, 2005

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Last week, I was reading this press release from a company claiming it has developed the first mathematical derivation of Amdahl’s Law. The Colorado-based company, Massively Parallel Technologies, Inc. (MPT), doesn’t offer a paper about this claim on its web site. Instead, it says its software “makes supercomputing faster and cheaper than ever before.” MPT adds that any cluster using its software can achieve almost 100% efficiency. For example, they say they operate a 255-processor cluster “that accelerates difficult problems involving heavy cross-communication by an astounding 250 to 350 times” or that a “cluster with 1023 nodes requires over 40,000 times less communication time steps than its conventional counterpart.” The company looks real, but its claim seem extravagant. Has anyone used this technology? Is there something real behind these claims? Read more and post your comments…

Let’s start with two paragraphs from the gibberish MPT press release

The Massively Parallel approach, now confirmed by Amdahl’s law as the most efficient method of parallel processing, concentrates on improving the efficiency of the communication methodology between processors. This has resulted in systems that exceed 90 percent efficiency rather than the previously believed limit of 20 percent. The breakthrough also allows systems to be built with low cost commodity hardware to solve problems in minutes rather than hours.

Impressed with MPT’s achievements, Dr. Amdahl now sits on the company’s board of advisors. “It is a great pleasure for me to see the fruits of my work being realized so dramatically by MPT,” said Amdahl. “MPT’s technology will allow supercomputing power to be used by anyone, anywhere and I have no doubt it will result in dramatic achievement and scientific advancements. The sky’s the limit.”

OK, let’s switch from the press release to what the company says about its technology.

One of the opening paragraph sounds reasonable.

There are three primary data movement times which are important to parallel processing. They are data input, data output, and cross-communication. HOWARD [,their trademarked software,] has several novel solutions for I/O. One solution balances the time it takes to “cascade” a problem called ‘ψ’ with the amount of time it takes to perform the I/O of that problem ‘# time-steps’. HOWARD does this via the use of multiple communication channels ‘ψ_base‘ and MPT’s proprietary “Howard Cascade.”

But later down through the page, things start to appear as unreal. MPT says for instance that “in order for a conventional system with 41,391 nodes relying upon fast connectivity to equal the performance of a HOWARD system using office LAN quality connectivity (100Mb/s), it would need channel speeds of 15 Tb/s.”

By the way, do you know many conventional systems with more than 40,000 nodes exist today? None — if we except the soon-to-be-finished IBM’s Blue Gene/L system.

It’s time to switch to the MPT’s applications page, where the company explains its secret.

The secret is in MPT’s revolutionary new approach to parallel processing. HOWARD, unlike conventional architectures, does not rely upon fast low latency communication channels to connect processors in order to achieve the parallelism necessary to dramatically boost processing performance. Instead HOWARD is based upon an entirely new mathematical geometry in the distribution of problems to multiple processors and for cross-communicating partial solutions from one processor to another. The geometry utilized in a HOWARD cluster of 1023 nodes, for example, can utilize office LAN quality 100 Mb/s Ethernet connections for its channels and yet outperform conventional clusters with expensive 10 GB/s connectivity. In fact, for the most difficult of all cross-communication exercises, an “all to all” exchange between processors, the geometry of a HOWARD” cluster with 1023 nodes requires over 40,000 times less communication time steps than its conventional counterpart.

And MPT gives an example about the oil and gas industry, a sector I worked with for a number of years.

HOWARD is already revolutionizing the oil and gas industry. MPT currently operates a 255-processor cluster that processes seismic data so rapidly that it can produce nearly five million dollars worth of finished seismic data per year at an annual operating cost of just $250,000.

And if these fabulous numbers haven’t convinced you yet, what about the costs of an MPT solution?

The price per processor in a conventional parallel processing system is usually in the $10,000 to $100,000 range, while the efficiency of the system is usually under 10%. Thus a solution on a conventional system costs 40 to 400 times the price that it would cost if delivered on a single processor workstation in which the total cost of the system is around $2,500.

How is it possible that such a company has been ignored by the media — if its claims are true?

By the way, they really filed an application for a trademark for HOWARD. You can check with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. MPT files its “computer software in the field of parallel processing” under number 78513638 on November 9, 2004. But a trademark doesn’t imply that’s a product is good.

I’ve been involved for twenty years in supercomputing, working with many different parallel systems. And I never saw something similar to MPT’s claims. Is the company on something real? I’ve serious doubts, even if MPT received some grants from DARPA. If you ever used their software, or heard about it, please post your comments.

Sources: Massively Parallel Technologies press release, January 18, 2005; and MPT website

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Michael Stonebraker is well-known in the database business, and for good reasons. He was the computer science professor behind Ingres and Postgres. Eighteen months ago, he started a new company, StreamBase, with another computer science professor, Stan Zdonik, with the goal of speeding access to relational databases. In “Data On The Fly,” Forbes.com reports that the company software, also named StreamBase, is reading TCP/IP streams and using asynchronous messaging. Streaming data without storing it on disk as are doing other relational database software gives them a tremendous speed advantage. The company claims it can process 140,000 messages per second on a $1,500 PC, when its competitors can only deal with 900 messages per second. Too good to be true? Read more…

Here are some excerpts from the Forbes article.

“Relational databases are one to two orders of magnitude too slow,” says Stonebraker, who is chief technology officer at Streambase, a 25-person outfit based in Lexington, Mass. “Big customers have already tried to use relational databases for streaming data and dismissed them. Those products are non-starters in this market.”

In a recent pilot program, Streambase was able to analyze 140,000 messages per second, while a leading relational database — Stonebraker won’t say which one — could handle only 900 messages per second. Streambase has 12 customers now testing its software, all of them financial services companies that need to analyze rapid-fire ticker feeds and other streaming data.

Unlike traditional database programs, Streambase analyzes data without storing it to disk, performing queries on data as it flows. Traditional systems bog down because they first store data on hard drives or in main memory and then query it, Stonebraker says.

The software, which should be commercially available next month, runs on Linux and Solaris, but a Microsoft version should be available soon.

The database business is not a cheap one. So how much this new company will charge for a — largely — unproven software?

Streambase charges customers annual subscriptions for its software, setting prices based on how many CPUs a customer uses to power the software. Typical deals so far have ranged from $100,000 to $300,000 a year, says Barry Morris, Streambase’s chief executive.

In “StreamBase eyes real-time streaming apps,” InfoWorld wrote the prices shoud be lower.

The software is available via a subscription model, with pricing in the range of approximately $50,000 per year, Stonebraker said. Subscriptions are sold on a per-CPU basis.

Who will be the customers for these speedy accesses to their databases? Let’s come back to Forbes.com.

For now Streambase is focusing attention on financial services companies, which hope to do things like track how well traders are performing on a real-time basis, rather than aggregating trades at the end of the day and analyzing them overnight.

A bigger opportunity involves processing real-time data feeds generated by sensor networks and RFID tags. A military contractor wants to use Streambase to keep track of soldiers and vehicles in the battlefield. A casino in Las Vegas is considering using Streambase to track the performance of individual gamblers.

In an interview with InfoWorld, Stonebraker gave more details about military applications.

We did a prototype that dealt with army battalion monitoring. When an army battalion is 30,000 humans and 12,000 vehicles, the army is deadly serious about getting a vital signs monitor on every one of the humans so they can do combat medical triage or [take other actions]. They already have a GPS system in every vehicle, but that didn’t keep Jennifer Lynch’s convoy from getting lost.

They want to turn this into a system to watch the position of every vehicle and compare it against where you’re supposed to be. They also want to put a sensor on the gun turret. Together with position, that allows you to detect crossfire which is a big problem in Iraq. [Also,] they want to put a monitor on the gas gauge and figure out do you have enough fuel to accomplish your mission. It’s this style of application which is large amounts of real-time data with real-time actions to take.

All these numbers, and some pages on the company website are all rosy, but if you want to read a whitepaper or some benchmarks, you need to register — and to be accepted. I’m not sure if it’s a good way to find new customers. But, after all, the company only plans to do some business next month.

If you know solid numbers about this company’s claims, please let me know.

Sources: Daniel Lyons, Forbes.com, January 18, 2005; Paul Krill, InfoWorld, January 7 and 11, 2005; and StreamBase website

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• Databases
  


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A few months back, in “Will Azul Reign on the Server Market?,” I wrote about Azul Systems and its new approach to computing named ‘network-attach processing,’ similar to the NAS approach for data storage. Now Shahin Khan, VP and CMO at the company, has written a rather provocative article for The Register, “Get ready to buy chips by the kilo.” He argues that we soon should be prepared to order CPUs by the thousands and be ready for some new language. “Do we say: 2.5 kilo CPUs? Do we call this kilo core, or mega core processing? And since it goes way past current multi-core technology, do we call it poly-core technology?” Jon Udell, from InfoWorld, also commented Khan’s views in “VM-enabled polycore computing.” Read more…

Basically, Shahin Khan says that we are now used to very large numbers when we talk about memory or disk space for servers, but that the vast majority of us is still counting processors using single digits.

But when it comes to CPUs, we still mostly dabble in single digits. An 8-way server feels like a pretty large system. The 32-way, 64-way, and 200-way systems feel just huge. Even when we scale out, anything beyond a couple of hundred CPUs begins to challenge our ability to manage and operate the systems. It’s no accident that they call these systems a “complex.”

A major shift is coming. Over the next few years, your ordinary applications will be able to tap into systems with, say, 7,000 CPUs, 50 tera bytes of memory, and 20 peta bytes of storage. In 2005, Azul Systems will ship compute pools with as many as 1,200 CPUs per a single standard rack (1.2 kilo cores! — I like the sound of that!)

Of course, these remarks are more valid for the commercial data centers. In the scientific and technical segments of computing, there are already many existing superclusters using thousands of processors.

Khan explains how this trend towards large numbers of processors will influence application design and offer new possibilities for managing a data center.

Deployment and administration of applications would also change dramatically. Do you ever worry about how much storage an individual user might need? Probably not. [...] Do you ever worry about the utilization level of an individual byte of memory? I hope not. You have so many bytes that you measure utilization at the aggregate level.

Logically, he doesn’t forget to mention his company.

If you had hundreds of CPUs in a miniaturized “big-iron” system that were available to your applications, you could adopt the same strategy for applications. No need to plan capacity for each individual application. Let all of your users share a huge compute pool and plan capacity across many applications. In the process, you also fundamentally change the economics of computing. Well, that’s exactly what Azul Systems is pioneering.

This is a whole new way of looking at the CPU, and therefore, the function of “compute.” This approach is gaining mainstream acceptance. The industry has reached 2 or 4 CPUs on a chip for large symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems; and for systems limited to one chip, tens of functional units in one CPU. Some companies have announced future chips with as many as 8 CPUs on a single chip. With 24 CPUs on a chip that can be used in an SMP system, Azul has already set the bar much higher. And that’s just the beginning!

And before wishing us the best for 2005, Khan imagines a possible title for a 2005 press release.

Poly-core Technology to Enable Kilo Core Processing. Happy Apps Hail Freedom!!

Like in September 2004, I still don’t know if Azul Systems will be successful. But at least, I admire them for their innovative approach to computing with the additional risk of using their own custom chips.

Sources: Shahin Khan, VP and CMO at Azul Systems, for The Register, January 11, 2005; and various websites

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Many recent studies conclude that we don’t sleep enough during our working week. For example, the National Sleep Foundation — the other NSF — says that 40% of adults admit that the quality of their work suffers when they’re sleepy. So what should we do? Take a nap during the day. But this practice is not widely supported by companies — to say the least. If you live in Manhattan, a small company, MetroNaps, has a solution for you and is even “profiting from nonproductiveness,” according to Wired News. All you have to do is to go to a suite in the 24th floor of the Empire State Building and pay $14 for a 20-minute nap in an adjustable and ergonomic chair. For people who don’t live in Manhattan, Metronaps can rent you one of its pods for installation in your office. But you’ll have to convince your HR department that you’ll be more productive after a nap. Try to get an appointment in the morning, when you don’t need this refreshing nap. Read more…

Before going further, where will you take this nap?

Now, why do we need naps during our working days?

According to the stats on America’s need for sleep, plenty of people could use a nap. More than 50 percent of Americans are sleep-deprived, nap expert and Boston University professor Bill Anthony said, and the average American gets fewer than seven hours of sleep per night — less than the prescribed gold standard of about eight hours, Anthony said.

Sleepy employees can be bad for business, encouraging errors and injury. People who nap — be it for a few minutes or a few hours — can improve their mood and productivity, Anthony said.

But very few companies have nap rooms, and napping at work is not even considered as acceptable behavior by lots of companies. This is why Metronaps developed its concept.

Enter MetroNaps, where company creators Arshad Chowdhury and Christopher Lindholst are hoping Manhattanites looking for a midday pickup will stop by their office, kick back in one of their eight adjustable chairs and catch a light snooze, for $14 a pop.

People appear to be biting, as a new store is opening in Canada’s Vancouver International Airport in December. MetroNaps hopes to franchise its business model to other locations in the near future, and is exploring the possibility of leasing the nap pods to companies for employee use.

The company spent several years to refine the nap environment, paying particular attention to sound and light in the nap room.

And apparently, this napping concept is well received.

All different kinds of people come to nap, Lindholst said. While many of them are employees of the hundreds of businesses located within the Empire State Building, local teachers, Broadway actors and people from nearby firms also come in, as do tourists. Some building residents have sent their own employees over to MetroNaps and allowed them to expense the experience, Lindholst said.

“A lot of people who come here, they say … that they have been looking for a place like this. Sometimes they take naps in their office. For a lot of them it’s about time something like this came” along, Lindholst said.

So, now you have two reasons to go to the Empire State Building while you’re in New York.

First, take the elevator to the 86th floor and think about the 1957 movie from Leo McCarey, “An Affair to Remember,” in which Cary Grant waited in vain for Deborah Kerr. Then, take the elevator down to the 24th floor and take some rest.

Sources: Rachel Metz, Wired News, November 15, 2004; and various websites

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• Economy
  


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