IBM

Overheard: It’s official — IBM Roadrunner is world’s fastest computer

Perhaps surprisingly, more than 5 million PlayStation 3 owners in the U.S. have first-hand knowledge of at least one of the processors that carried the Roadrunner to victory. Walaika Haskins, IBM Roadrunner Meep-Meeps to Top of Supercomputer Rankings

The IBM supercomputer is powered by 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell chips similar to those found in the gaming console. The system’s 6,562 AMD Opteron dual-core processors handle the basic compute functions, leaving the Cell chips available to deal with the heavy lifting necessary for the math-intensive calculations in which the processors specialize.

Overheard: Redmond is the new Armonk

“15 years ago this month, Lou Gerstner arrived at IBM. When he got there, Gerstner found a company that literally didn’t believe in its own future. The mainframe business — the core of IBM — was collapsing. Other business units were busy trying to turn themselves into stand-alone companies that could be spun off. The big blue ship was sinking, and everyone wanted off.”  Frank Hayes, Frankly Speaking: Microsoft’s woes are like IBM’s of old

Frank Hayes makes an interesting comparison between IBM in the early 80’s and Microsoft today.

I remember the culture shock of those days. Signs appeared in offices: “The mainframe is dead.” Project managers and programmers were frantic, pitching themselves to whoever held the purse strings. Life in Poughkeepsie, New York would never be the same.  Lifetime tenure at IBM was a thing of the past. People had to prove their worth each and every day. The shakeup was stressful, but it worked. It made the sleeping giant more agile.

Now who will do that for Microsoft?

Video: IBM’s first supercomputer

The Computer History Museum has put together a great series of video tours. Here’s a peek at the IBM 7030, the first “supercomputer.”

Video: IBM unveils hydro-cluster green supercomputer

The product name is the Power 575. IBM is promoting is as a hydro-cluster supercomputer. To paint it green, the literature says the Power 575 requires 80 percent fewer air conditioning units and reduce total cooling costs by 40%. (It’s water-cooled).

Key points discussed at last visit to IBM:

1. Water cooling is 4,000 times more efficient than air cooling.

2. Air cooling has become too expensive and there’s a finite limit to how much power you can bring in.

3. It’s tough to budget ahead for air cooling – power costs are a big unfriendly variable.

4. Heated water is easier to recycle than heated air.

Overheard: Why the mainframe didn’t die

“The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to thrive because customers didn’t care about the underlying technology. Customers just wanted the mainframe to do its job at a lower cost, and IBM made the investments to make that happen.” Irving Wladawsky-Berger as quoted in Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking

John Belmont shows us IBM’s newest mainframe, the Z10. It has a starting price of about a million dollars.

Overheard: The jungle drums are beating “Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu”

IBM believes Linux on the enterprise desktop finally ready for widespread adoption. To meet future demand it is preparing to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0. Todd Weiss, IBM says end users with 100,000 desktops looking at Ubuntu Linux

It seems like everywhere I go, I’m hearing somebody talk about Ubuntu.

Overheard: What’s inside IBM’s Blue Cloud

“Blue Cloud is based on an open-source project called Hadoop that manages computing resources across large clusters of computers. Hadoop includes an open-source version of MapReduce, the same software Google uses to efficiently distribute its computing chores across its servers around the world.” Erick Schonfeld, IBM’s Blue Cloud is Web Computing By Another Name

Overheard: What IBM thinks about the future of advertising

The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did.IBM Institute for Business Value, The end of advertising as we know it

The report says that two-thirds of the advertising experts IBM polled expect 20 percent of their advertising revenue to shift from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.

Ummm….what does impact-based mean? And how the heck are we going to measure it?

Overheard: Tech acquisitions psychic predictions

“My money would go on IBM buying SUN at this point. But again, at the end of the day, Sun is a hardware company, despite noise to the contrary by pony-tail boy.” Marc Fleury, To consolidate or not to consolidate

Overheard: What the heck is computing in a cloud?

“The two companies [Google and IBM] are investing to build large data centers that students can tap into over the Internet to program and research remotely, which is called “cloud computing.” Steve Lohr, Google and I.B.M. Join in ‘Cloud Computing’ Research

Steve Lohr’s New York Times story started a buzzfire. The trouble is, even as I was reading it, I had no idea what Steve Lohr was talking about.

It’s not his fault.

“Computing in a cloud” is something Jeff Bezos name-dropped like crazy a year ago at MIT. Now here it is again.

What the heck is it?

Allow me to explain, Graszhoppa.

Many years ago, way back in 2003 or so, a computing model called “distributed computing” was being shopped around by The Open Group.

In this model, a big processing job gets split up into lots of little jobs and distributed out to different computers. The objective? To get super-computer power without having to build or buy a super-computer.

Clever eh? The University of Illinois thought so back in 1979.

So did SETI.

SETI stands for “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.” Because looking for ET requires a lot of computing power, scientists running the project asked for volunteers — ordinary people — to sign up on the Internet and donate their their home computer’s extra processing power. All this extra power could be harnessed over the Internet and coordinated to make a kind of virtual supercomputer. The project was called SETI@home. Lots of people signed up, including me.

Still following? Good.

Jump forward to 2007. Today, Wikipedia, Facebook and Google use this same distributed computing model — without the volunteers at home. It’s what you need for applications that are so big that you could never build them on a single server.

It’s what the future is going to look like when we don’t have to install our own software anymore. That’s right, Grazshoppa. Pretty soon we’ll access all our software applications over the Internet. Google and IBM Adobe are betting on it. So is Microsoft.

Now here’s the important part. For some reason the name “distributed computing” never caught on with the press. I’m not sure why. It seems to be a perfectly logical name, but it was kind of dull and well…ordinary. It never really got the attention it deserved. The name “Web computing” was vague and equally dull. It too, quickly faded out of the headlines.

So techies, being the patient persistent type, thought up a different name and promoted the model again.

This time they tried calling it “parallel computing.” It sounded important. But the name confused people. Parallel computing sounded too complicated, like it might have something to do with the inside of a computer.

So the techies changed the name once again — this time they decided to call it “grid computing. “

Grid computing was a friendlier name. It even sounded like it might have something to do with football. It looked good in headlines. Unfortunately, it made headlines right around the same time green computing did and people got confused, thinking it something to do with power grids and saving money on electricity.

Cluster computing didn’t work either. Somehow, it sounded vaguely sexual — an orgy of processing, cables and cords entwined in a hot server room. Nah. People felt embarrassed talking about cluster computing.

They considered “hardware as a service” but that brought up images of suits and budgets and contract negotiation. Better to avoid anything that smacked of service contracts. Big business likes to have control.

And anything with “outsourcing” in the title scared the hell out of people in the U.S. — so they wanted to avoid that word.

What to call it? Hmmmmmm.

Frustrated with stupid media people who were unable to understand and get behind a concept that is really quite simple (dividing up work and distributing it out) — those clever techies got together and thought up a name that:

1. Didn’t sound too complicated.
2. Would be easy to remember and look good in headlines.
3. Wouldn’t scare anyone.

They decided to call it “computing in a cloud.”

How clever! Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

IBM marketers thought so. They jumped right in and created a Blue Cloud.

No? You still don’t understand what “computing in a cloud” is?

Here’s a way to understand it: SETI was the only example of the distributed computing model that tech media people seemed to understand and SETI looks for intelligence in outer space — up there in the clouds.

By choosing this name, they’re joking that they’re looking for intelligent life.

So the new name they’ve invented for the press and hope we’ll finally accept and promote like crazy is “cloud computing.”

Get it? The intelligent life they seek is us, the media.

Those techies are so amusing.

It’s just distributed computing, young one.