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Power As A Limiting Factor
The interplay of power and heat have long been limiting factors in the design of chips. Tens of millions of transistors slammed together throw off a lot of heat, and too much heat will destroy the circuits themselves. Reducing the voltage that drives a chip helps, but only to a point because at levels that are too low, noise intrudes making it impossible to reliably distinguish 0 and 1 states. Lots of work goes therefore goes into the use of exotic materials and geometries, making chip design far more than just a problem of logical circuit engineering.
The same problems of power and heat appear to be emerging as limiting factors in the design of large scale web-centric systems. Scaling up or scaling out from a logical perspective involves adding more servers, but again only to a point because tens of thousands of servers will eat prodigious amounts of power and in turn cast off considerable heat. Thus, it's no surprise the Google is building many of its new centers near rivers, where there exists the promise of cheap electricity and relatively free cooling. However, the costs of energy are not that elastic: for small systems, one can largely ignore the power bills, but there comes a threshold one crosses where power and heat at the macro level become part of the systems design problem. Adding a few thousand more servers might seem like the right logical thing to do, but it may be physically and/or economically impractical.
Software developers have gotten away with being sloppy because of the abundance and rate of growth of compute cycles. However, the problems of large numbers start to intrude: just as power and heat become factors in the presence of tens of millions of transistors, power and heat become architectural considerations in the presence of teraflops of computation and petraflops of storage.
Quote of the day:
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Harry Truman
May 27 2007, 05:52:42 PM EDT
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$1 Million By The End Of Middle School
Slashdot is covering this story at VentureBeat about the CEO of a startup named Elementeo. The CEO, by the way, is just 13 years old, and he's more articulate about his work than many people I know who are multiples of his age. I was particularly taken by his business financial goal of making $1 million by the end of business school.
While life (and business) is far more than making obscene piles of money and while I hope that Mr. Samar takes the time to enjoy being a kid and to grow into a rich and balanced life, it is quite uplifting to see his passion for his work.
Quote of the day - actually, three of them, because there are so many good ones germane to this posting::
In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
Oscar Wilde
Work as if you were to live a hundred years, pray as if you were to die tomorrow.
Benjamin Franklin
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
Albert Einstein
May 21 2007, 08:55:51 AM EDT
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OOAD Third Edition
At long last, the third edition of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications is in print.
Robert Maksimchuk, Michael Engle, Bobbi Young, Jim Conallen, and Kelli Houston deserve all the credit. These folks are the authors of this revision, and I am deeply indebted to them for their dedication and fine work over the life of this project. Thanks also go to my long-suffering editors at Addison-Wesley who have exhibited the patience of Job and the encouragement of a varsity pep squad after a round of triple shot espressos. This third edition brings my original work up to date with UML 2.0, but also provides specific guidance for modeling across the lifecycle, team organization, and the fundamentals of the object model.
Quote of the day:
The research rat of the future allows experimentation without manipulation of the real world. This is the cutting edge of modeling technology.
John Spencer
May 18 2007, 01:38:46 PM EDT
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IBM in Second Life
And your thought IBM had no sense of humor. Check out this video.
Quote of the day:
As Hiro approaches the Street, he sees two young couples, probably using their parents' computers for a double date in the Metaverse, climbing down out of Port Zero, which is the local port of entry and monorail stop. He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to the specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars.
Neal Stephenson
May 11 2007, 10:30:08 AM EDT
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Travels
Alas, I've not made the time to blog for several weeks, as I've been traveling extensively. I just returned from New York City, before that I was in the San Francisco bay area, and in a little over a week I'll be back in the bay. I have more requests to travel than I could possibly accommodate in a lifetime, and so it is a very real challenge for me to balance my schedule. On the average I receive two to three requests to travel every day, and I can only say yes to a very few of them. Travel that advances my work on the Handbook comes highest on the list, customer work is up there too (as long as it's for helping a customer materially, for I'm not nor ever will be a sales guy) , and offers to go to new and interesting places get a slightly higher priority as well. Problem is, that's the nature of most of my requests, and so I have to made hard calls daily. Mind you, I'm not complaining - this really is a blessed problem to have - but I know I have to disappoint many who would like me to drop in, and I simply cannot. Speaking of interesting places, I'm currently working to set a time to interview Fred Brooks on behalf of the Computer History Museum and am also trying to sort out my international travel for the year: the UK, India, and China are vying for my attention right now.
Quote of the day:
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Maya Angelou
May 10 2007, 11:36:09 AM EDT
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Remembrance Of Things Past
Call me Ishmael.
Sorry, wrong literary allusion. Call me strange, then. I absolutely love to read. For me it's pretty much the most fun I can have with my clothes on. Although I know it annoys my friends, I often toss out some random quote or an obscure phrase in the middle of a conversation. One of the genres I love to read include books of quotations, and recently I've been reading Cohen and Major's History of Quotations, a collection that organizes its contents chronologically. There's one passage that took my breath away because it captures what I'm trying to do with the Handbook.
Quote of the day:
I write in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what has been done.
Herodotus
Apr 02 2007, 09:38:37 AM EDT
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Better Than Life
I'm a rabid fan of Red Dwarf. I was first introduced to this cult hit, not by the television series, but by the two books by Grant Naylor, Red Dwarf and its sequel Better Than Life. As Wikipedia explains, "BTL is the name of a virtual reality game engineered to pander to the player's most intimate fantasies. ... The danger of the game is that once the user starts to play, the game actually makes them forget they actually started to play, so they believe that they are still in reality."
Ok, now let's talk about Second Life.
In many ways, SL is BTL. Wander the streets of that virtual world and you will indeed find people who have created a very full alternate reality for themselves. The implications of that fact is far beyond the scope of my expertise, but in the short time I've been inworld, I have encountered people who cannot walk in RL but can fly in SL and thus are made more free, people who have never left their country of origin but now travel the virtual world daily, people who have dreams and fantasies they could never carry out in RL but can do so without material consequence in SL. There is avarice and evil and intrigue to be found in SL - just as it is in RL - but there is also much that is noble and good and genuine and beautiful there as well - also as it is in RL. Is SL and its equivalents a passing fancy? I think not. I have seen the future, and it is virtual.
While preparing for some upcoming work in SL, I soon came across Chuck Hamilton, an IBMer who has been at the center of gravity of much of IBMs presence inworld. I was stunned to learn from Chuck that, late last year, there were only 325 IBM residents of SL but today there are now over 4,000. Today also IBM owns 22 islands in SL, and there are 36 more on order. For IBM, SL is big business, and a purposeful one at that. Chuck - inworld as Longg Weeks and I as Alem Theas - recently gave me a tour of these virtual IBM facilities, and pointed out that they are not just for fun, but have been used for a number of relevant business activities. Chuck highlights some of this work at MeetingsNet and Fast Company. This effort is very much on Sam's agenda, as noted in this report detailing IBM's investment in virtual worlds.
Want to learn more about IBM's work inworld? Read this, this, this, and this. But, don't miss this, this, this, this, and this.
But wait, there's more. Check out here, here, and here. Whew. And you thought IBM was all about pocket protectors and ties.
Quote of the day:
Rimmer: "Do you think it's because the sub-space conduits have locked with the transponder calibrations and caused a major tachyon surge that has overloaded the time matrix?"Kryten: "Ah, no, sir. I've just been jabbing it too hard."
Red Dwarf
Mar 23 2007, 08:12:39 PM EDT
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Excellence In Programming
This week, at SD West, I received the Dr. Dobb's Journal Excellence in Programming Award. Previous winners include Bruce Schneier, Linus Torvalds, James Gosling, Erich Gamma, Guido van Rossum, Jon Bentley, Anders Hejlsberg, P. J. Plauger, and Guy Steele. I am very humbled to be counted in this group.
I wasn't able to attend the awards ceremony in real life, so this part of the awards ceremony was done in Second Life. If you happen to be inworld, I'm Alem Theas, so feel free to im me there.
Quote of the day:
Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.
Cicero
Mar 23 2007, 05:28:23 PM EDT
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Software Risks
Peter Neumann moderates the ACM forum on risks to the public in computers and related systems. This forum offers some code-curdling stories that may make you want to run away to a remote island, far, far away from anything with a transistor in it.
In the spirit of Peter's work, one of my blog readers sent me this story about the (non fatal) crash of an F22, a $133+ million dollar loss due to the failure of the flight control system after a brief power hit. If you've never read a military aircraft accident report, this one makes for an interesting bedtime story. This same reader told me of a more recent event, in February of this year, when a squadron of fighters passed over the international date line, an event that, in his words, "hosed the navigation software" and required that they turn around and return to base, following the fuel tanker to guide them (since navigation systems we no longer functioning).
Quote of the day:
Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do.
Chris Mason
Mar 22 2007, 07:05:39 PM EDT
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John Backus
Last fall, I had the extreme pleasure of interviewing John Backus on behalf of the Computer History Museum. John was a gracious, engaging, and brilliant man.
I am sad to report that John passed away at his home in Oregon last Saturday.
Quote of the day:
Conventional languages are basically high-level, complex versions of the von Neumann computer. Although I refer to conventional languages as "von Neumann languages" to take note of the origin and style, I do not, of course, blame the great mathematician for their complexity. In fact, some might say that I bear some responsbility for that problem.
John Backus
Mar 20 2007, 12:27:00 AM EDT
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Patents Gone Wild
Fellow IBMer Jim Conallen pointed me to this report which indicates that the linked list data structure has been patented. A quick search at the USPTO verifies that this claim is real: the abstract for this patent may be found here. The patent was filed on September 26, 2002, the inventor being Ming-Jen Wang of LSI Logic Corporation, and subsequently US Patent 7028023 was granted last year, on April 11th, 2006.
I absolutely respect every company's and individual's right to aggressively pursue the protection of their intellectual property. IMHO, however, this patent seems to me to overreach: patenting something that seems a) patently obvious and b) a manifestation of prior art does not, IMHO, serve the industry at all. Who at the USPTO reviewed and accepted this patent, one wonders?
Quote of the day:
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power.
Benjamin Franklin
Mar 19 2007, 09:33:00 AM EDT
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Identity Crisis
In preparing for my first virtual lecture in Second Life, I've experienced some deep identity issues that will take years of therapy to unravel.
This is a short story, but it takes a long time to tell it, so I'll just give you a short version of the short story. I created a Second Life avatar (call it/him/her/me AM for now). My IBM colleagues in Europe created a shape/skin/clothing package that looks frighteningly like me. I imported the outfit and put it on. AM now projects Grady in the virtual world. So far, so good.
But wait: the SL servers undergo a major upgrade. Login for AM fails, because of problems in converting my inventory to the new Second Life database. Messages to Second Life support go unanswered for a week and the time for my event rapidly approaches. In desperation, I create a new Second Life avatar (call it/him/her/me AM'). I login as AM', have my IBM friends send me the Grady shape/skin/clothing package a second tim, I import it and put it on: huzzah! for AM' now projects Grady in the virtual world. Clearly the problem lay in the Second Life database conversion mechanisms, over which I have no control.
So, I now "live" in a virtual world in two places: as AM and AM'. To confuse matters more, I created the AM avatar as a male and the AM' avatar as a female (don't ask, that's a really long story that takes a really long time to tell). Ergo, I am both identity- as well as gender-confused in my virtual life. If you encounter my virtual self, you'll see me as either the female AM' (for now) or the male AM (when support finally fixes their conversion bug).
I need to sit down for a moment, my very real world is making my head spin.
Quote of the day:
Virtual Reality: When Reality is not enough
Michael Crichton
Mar 19 2007, 05:42:00 AM EDT
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My Virtual Life
In a couple of weeks, my virtual self will be giving a virtual lecture in the virtual world of Second Life. Virtual space will be limited, so register soon at this site.
Quote of the day:
At least I have chicken.
Leeroy Jenkins
Mar 15 2007, 04:37:00 PM EDT
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Alice
I'm back from Kentucky. I had a delightful time at SIGCSE, where 1,300 educators were present. There is much going on in this community to commend: the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula and its recommendations for undergraduate and even K to 12 classes is fascinating reading. Another wonderful development is Alice which seems to really be hitting its stride this year. Alice is an effort of CMU that, in their words, is "a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world." Alice offers a very approachable and playful path to programming, using a platform familiar to the emerging generation that furthermore is directed to women as well as men (and the percentage of women in the computer sciences is an embarrassingly low number).
Quote of the day:
Alice laughed, "There's no use trying," she said, "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Lewis Carroll
Mar 12 2007, 07:42:00 PM EDT
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Software architecture, software engineering, and Renaissance Jazz
