rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
October 6, 2005 at 1:34 am · Filed under Grid Computing
David Lifka leads the Cornell Theory Center (i.e., the CTC). If you are (still) questioning the viability of Windows for cluster computing, you should check out the work they have done. They offer a free workshop – I went last year. Interesting content plus you get to check out their visualization cave!
He spoke about what they do there and more of the story: Windows, IIS, SQL Server, Web services, Visual Studio, . . . All together this makes an excellent platform for computing.
David brought up the problem with network load balancing (NLB) applied to distributed computing. It is transaction based. If transactions/second go down, then the server is loaded higher. Long running tasks (e.g., a large BLAST search) will have a low t/s resulting in more tasks assigned to that machine. Then you get a grinding halt. This approach works well for short transaction-based requests (think Web-sites) and poorly for computation-intense applications.
He brings this up for a good reason: many people think that application distribution can be achieved by simply implementing NLB across a set of Web servers. The answer, as is often the case, is: “well, under some circumstances, maybe.”
He also uses an alternate to the term “grid”: “Heterogeneous Wide Area Distributed Computing”. Meaning, a Grid that isn’t necessarily based on Globus.
Tags: grid, Microsoft
October 5, 2005 at 11:12 pm · Filed under Grid Computing
Here at the Microsoft eScience event – my special thanks to the organizers. Apparently I wasn’t registered! No problem – they will get me a badge during the break.
Jim Gray kicked off the event with a historical view of science – that we have now gone into the era of data analysis. This is clearly the case in many different scientific domains: the sheer amount of measurements being taken, collected, and stored is phenomenal. Analyzing this data.
He described how on a 15-20M astronomy project (I think he was talking about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (http://Skyserver.sdss.org), up to a 1/2 of that is spent on software development. This doesn’t count the programming done by the astronomers! Certainly, some of this software development includes that related to the science, but most of it is the development of an entire distributed computing system to support this one project.
His point: the tools aren’t good enough yet. I agree that this is true across the grid/distributed computing domain. There is too much computer science and IT skill necessary to build and maintain these systems. We are trying to make this easier in our own domain.
I hadn’t heard Jim‘s pragmatic side: He talked a bit about how we computer scientists need to engage the domain experts in science:
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find someone who is desperate (who has a lot of need)
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don’t try to go deep into go from working to working (i.e., deliver as you go)
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give 100x value
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give 20% of a solution (the other 80% will take 10 years)
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Don’t make your project’s success depend on another project’s success.
Replace “domain experts in science“ with customer, and Jim Gray sounds like a sales manager! Maybe we can get him hawking the Digipede Network!
Tags: grid, Microsoft
September 23, 2005 at 8:02 am · Filed under Web 2.0
Robert Scoble is spending a bit of time refuting this point. The latest post is here where he refers to responses to the current company meeting. He is in a good position to refute these claims as he has a broad view of what products are coming at Microsoft.
I do find the premise that “Microsoft is done for” a bit naive. I’m sure people have reason to be skeptical about recent management changes, execution of new projects, and as far as I know, concerns about company morale and cohesiveness.
But, so many are so anxious to relate the story of Microsoft’s imminent demise that they are not seeing straight. People keep looking for the next big thing and then making the connection that is the Microsoft killer.
Linux was going to dethrone Windows. Well, no. Certainly very many machines that might be running (and licensing) Windows are running Linux; however, the growth of new machines running Windows is phenomenal. Microsoft is winning this battle.
Now Google is going to dethrone Microsoft. How again?
- With the best search engine out there?
- With the best mapping / sattellite software?
- A new special-purpose OS (quick, everybody: rewrite everything! Microsoft will be buried in a year!). (Dan has recently posted some thoughts on this)
- With new applications for Windows? A new Word processor?
- In the enterprise?
I see much more opportunity for synergy between these companies than one destroying the other (I actually have tremendous respect for Google, by the way). I can understand why there is a battle here starting with the search engine (and going down into the OS). Microsoft wants to be the top search engine (eyeballs equate to revenues in the search market). But, this doesn’t equate to Google causing Microsoft’s demise.
And of course, Microsoft is not sitting still and waiting to be destroyed by anybody. Not only are they creating new products (and product features), but they are working on a bigger more connected vision that is actually pretty cool.
I think the big problem is that the Microsoft haters will always hate Microsoft. These people revel knowing that Google and Microsoft are at war and hope they have finally chosen the right horse.
Anyway, I think the reports of Microsoft’s death are greatly exaggerated. (apologies to Mark Twain).
Tags: Google, Microsoft, Web2.0
September 15, 2005 at 10:56 am · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
The Universal Studios party was a lot of fun. I have not been there since the 70s. Jaws and the Six Million Dollar Man were the exciting things to see then. Now, I think the highlights are The Mummy Returns ride and the Jurassic Park ride.
They are not kidding when they say you get wet on Jurassic Park. The guys I went with weren’t too keen on getting wet, but I went straight for the front of the boat. The attendant told us the front-left was the worst on the boat. That is where I sat. I could tell what was coming because once I sat down (before the ride left) my pants were already quite wet. Anyway, it was a blast.
We brought a prospective customer with us to the party. He only recently began coding for the Microsoft OS. at one point, out of the blue, he said “Man, I have to tell you, that Visual Studio absolutely rocks!” He was talking about Visual Studio 2003.
Thanks to Microsoft for a great party and a great PDC05!
Tags: Microsoft, PDC05
September 14, 2005 at 1:23 pm · Filed under .NET
I forgot to mention the LINQ project yesterday. Integrating query into the language is such an incredible productivity enhancement. Of all of the new technologies I have seen at this PDC, this is the one that resonates the most with me as a developer. The ability to create strongly typed data representations and queries integrated into the compiler for ensuring language semantics is huge. I think of all the code that we have written in .NET for which we have to translate data in and out of SQL; all of the queries that we have written that cannot be effectively validated until runtime; and the numbers of places in our code where changes must be kept in sync. With LINQ, the initial development time will be greatly reduced, but almost more important, the future maintenance cost will also greatly reduced.
I got into a discussion with Dan about the posting by Paul Mooney about the Google/Microsoft judgment was bigger news then the Bill Gates keynote (as indicated by the relative placement of these news items in a newspaper). This doesn’t really surprise me (everyone wants to know if Ballmer really threw that chair). Seriously, though, I think that a lot of the technologies that are being unveiled at PDC05 fall into two camps:
1. Vista and Office 12. I fear that the delays in Vista and perception of Office (see my earlier post) may make these stories not “sexy” to the mainstream press.
2. Really cool technology for developers. The typical business person has heard this story a million times already. In fact, above I post that LINQ will allow me to develop better software more quickly and that it will be easier to maintain. That is an obvious cost benefit to companies of all kinds. But is saving money with better tools an interesting story? Hasn’t the press written thousands of stories just like this before? I’m not arguing that it isn’t cool or that it isn’t revolutionary technology. I’m just arguing that your typical reader doesn’t get it.
Tags: linq, Microsoft, PDC05
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