One computer to rule them all

February 06, 2008

IBM has launched an ambitious initiative, called Project Kittyhawk, aimed at building "a global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application." Forget Thomas Watson's apocryphal remark that the world may need only five computers. Maybe it needs just one.

The Register's Ashlee Vance points to a fascinating white paper about the IBM program. The effort focuses on expanding the company's Blue Gene supercomputer to handle web-scale applications of every imaginable stripe - to create a "generic" computing platform, incorporating millions of processors, that can essentially run anything you throw at it. The authors argue that the reigning, Google-style model of web-scale computing - big clusters of cheap servers - was born of necessity, rather than choice, and has fundamental flaws:

At present, almost all of the companies operating at web-scale are using clusters of commodity computers, an approach that we postulate is akin to building a power plant from a collection of portable generators. That is, commodity computers were never designed to be efficient at scale, so while each server seems like a low-price part in isolation, the cluster in aggregate is expensive to purchase, power and cool in addition to being failure-prone. Despite the inexpensive network interface cards in commodity computers, the cost to network them does not scale linearly with the number of computers. The switching infrastructure required to support large clusters of computers is not a commodity component, and the cost of high-end switches does not scale linearly with the number of ports. Because of the power and cooling properties of commodity computers many datacenter operators must leave significant floor space unused to fit within the datacenter power budget, which then requires the significant investment of building additional datacenters.

In a comprehensive article set to be published in the IEEE spectrum this May (I’ve seen the draft), Briscoe explains that the entire Net Neutrality debate is a misunderstanding and that the lack of fundamental fairness in the TCP standards is root cause of the problem.  He explains that ISPs trying to throttle P2P applications are actually masking the real problem in the TCP standards and that it’s perpetuating the illusion that everything is alright and fair.  Briscoe also points out that any kind of protocol-level traffic shaping can easily be mistaken by politicians as anticompetitive behavior.

Briscoe also explains that throttling P2P applications is a poor solution on a technical level because it unnecessarily slows down P2P too much and only results in marginal improvements for other applications.  A better TCP implementation would allow the unattended P2P file transfers to complete just as quickly as an unmanaged network with no throttling or performance caps yet it would allow everyone else’s interactive applications to burst whenever they like.  While this might sound too good to be true, it isn’t hard to believe once you understand that the goals of P2P file transfers and the goal of interactive applications are not mutually exclusive.  Once you understand Bob Briscoe’s proposal, it becomes quickly apparent that it’s a win for everyone.

Posted by: squashedArchos 5 is a locked PMP. But not anymore.



(it has wifi, big storage, touch screen, complete Linux support. $299 -ish. figure it out people...what they gonna do with it. This is not your grandfathers mp3 player)

Why the "mobile Internet" is a poor investment

The reason that we have vibrant startup driven innovation is because the Internet is open by nature. Anyone can participate without asking permission and anyone can compete with anyone else at every layer of the stack. This DNA of open and free competition (except for the occasional semi-monopoly) is what allows startups like Google to come in and displace incumbents. If it weren't for the Internet, I'm positive that the telcos would have determined that it was the most efficient that THEY design and operate the "online directories"...

In 2006 in Japan, mobile advertising was only $330M vs Content (Ringtones, Song-tones, Games) at $2.2B and Commerce at $4.7B. (http://www.johotsusintokei.soumu.go.jp/whitepaper/eng/WP2007/2007-index.html) Although all of us are experimenting with advertising and advertising is increasing on mobile, the overwhelming percentage of money spent on mobile devices goes to paying for and the collection of payments for a small number of not so innovative products from a small number of providers.

 

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/25/why-the-mobile-inter.html#comments

Openmoko's Open Source Phone Goes Mass-Market

Seagate Announces First 1.5TB Desktop Hard Drive

oh man!

That's awesome.  Now, let's see how good it does...

Citizen Engineer: new video series on hacking, hardware, and art.

Samsung claimed in the report that its 42nm devices were about 40 percent more cost-efficient than its 51nm technology and approximately 60 percent lower in cost than its 57nm technology.

The Samsung spokesperson was also reported as saying that, "We will transfer our chip processing technology to an even finer 39nm level in the first quarter of 2009.”

However, Gartner noted in its weekly newsletter to clients that NAND flash prices have plummeted with 8Gb and 16Gb MLC NAND devices dropping to $2 on the spot market, which are below cashcost for all manufacturers at the 4Xnm process geometry node, regardless of ‘maturity.’

Researchers Decentralize BitTorrent