Entries Tagged 'Business' ↓

Nice article about multicore processing in the  July 2010 of IEEE Spectrum by David Patterson . Interesting analogy about parallel computing and news reporting.

But why is parallel processing so challenging? An analogy helps here. Programming is in many ways like writing a news story. Potentially, 10 reporters could complete a story 10 times as fast as a single reporter could ever manage it. But they’d need to divide a task into 10 equally sized pieces; otherwise they couldn’t achieve a full tenfold speedup.

Complications would arise, however, if one part of the story couldn’t be written until the rest of it was done. The 10 reporters would also need to ensure that each bit of text was consistent with what came before and that the next section flowed logically from it, without repeating any material. Also, they would have to time their efforts so that they finished simultaneously. After all, you can’t publish a story while you’re still waiting for a piece in the middle to be completed. These same issues—load balancing, sequential dependencies, and synchronization—challenge parallel programmers.

Further along:

All in all, things look pretty bleak.

But he continues:

Nevertheless, there has been progress in some communities. In general, parallelism can work when you can afford to assemble a crack team of Ph.D.-level programmers to tackle a problem with many different tasks that depend very little on one another. One example is the database systems that banks use for managing ATM transactions and airlines use for tracking reservations. Another example is Internet searching. It’s much easier to parallelize programs that deal with lots of users doing pretty much the same thing rather than a single user doing something very complicated. That’s because you can readily take advantage of the inherent task-level parallelism of the problem at hand.

Other success stories referred to are Computer Graphics, Weather Prediction (one of the workhorse applications for supercomputing – one of PARAM’s main use has been in the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF)) and simulations.

The La-Z-Boy era of program performance is now officially over, so programmers who care about performance must get up off their recliners and start making their programs parallel.

Despite these reasons for hope, the odds are still against the microprocessor industry squarely completing its risky Hail Mary pass and finding some all-encompassing way to convert every piece of software to run on many parallel processors. I and other ­researchers at the main centers of parallel-­computing research—including Georgia Tech, the University of Illinois, Rice University, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley—certainly don’t expect that to happen. So rather than working on general programming languages or computer designs, we are instead trying to create a few important applications that can take advantage of many-core microprocessors. Although none of these groups is likely to develop the ultimate killer app, that’s not the intention. Rather, we hope that the hardware and software we invent will contain some of the key innovations needed to make parallel programming straightforward. If we’re successful, this work should help to usher in whatever application ultimately wins the “killer” distinction.

He finishes off with:

No matter how the ball bounces, it’s going to be fun to watch, at least for the fans. The next decade is going to be interesting.

via IEEE Spectrum: The Trouble With Multicore.

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New feature on the all new Yahoo! Mail – hide ads and get more real estate. From the Ymail blog:

To give you more real estate to read your emails, we are adding a button just to the left of the advertisement in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Clicking that button will hide the ad temporarily, while you read your email.

Hide Ads on Yahoo! Mail

This is a handy tool, especially if you are using a computer with a smaller screen resolution like a small laptop or netbook.

The article goes on to say the tool does not remove ads permanently:

Ads are what allow us to provide you Yahoo! Mail as a free service and hopefully they’re sometimes useful and interesting too.

And they are what pay my salary too 

via You Asked for It… A Collapse Ad Button in the All-New Yahoo! Mail.

Innovation is a buzz-word today. Two interesting facets that have emerged are “User-Driven Innovation” and “Open Innovation”. These two similar sounding terms are pretty different as pointed out in this article by Stefan Lindegaard.

Open innovation is about integrating external partners in the entire innovation process. This should happen not just in the idea or technology development phase but also in all other phases towards market acceptance. User-driven innovation is great as it directs your innovation efforts towards market needs. Open innovation takes you to the next step by providing more opportunities through external partners as you address those market needs.

via Why User-Driven Innovation Should Not Be Confused With Open Innovation | Stefan Lindegaard: Leadership+Innovation.

Interesting and educative article on Innovation and its workings within an organisation. The author points out that Innovation means doing things differently and most of the time we are just tweaking with existing systems, squeezing out just a little bit more value – not anything groundbreaking.

Most companies everywhere are struggling to grow right now. With their revenues flat to down, they’re cutting costs to raise profits. But cutting costs faster than revenues decline is no prescription for long-term success. It is, rather, as Gary Hamel, the author of The Future of Management, puts it, “management inertia.” Businesses are on a track that is easy to follow but ultimately self-destructive.

The answer seems to be innovation. Yet few businesses are any good at innovation. For all their brainstorming exercises and “open innovation” programs, they mostly just come up with reformulations of existing products, new pricing plans and basic updates–the sameBusinesses ask their “strategic customers” where to innovate and get little advice. Those customers are usually strategic only in that they are large, not because they have any particular market insight. They too just want more, better and cheaper, which are hardly recommendations for true innovation.

via Why The Pursuit Of Innovation Usually Fails – Forbes.com.

This is my brief about Day 2 at the Business TechnologySummit. You can find day 1 here. Unfortunately, I reached the venue just as Nils Puhlmann
was finishing up his security keynote — “A New World to Protect”. One the things I really liked about his talk was the fact that he emphsises that security does not exist in a vacuum. You have to ensure that your neighbours also keep their doors and windows locked essentially to deter thieves and keep the neighbourhood safe.

Post coffee, I was busy scrambling to find Internet connectivity to catch up on e-mail and stuff. Thanks to Airtel holding up the Saltmarch guys by promising 16Mbps broadband and limited it to less than 8Mbps and that too only in the common area outside the halls (how far can you get with a single, ordinary, consumer-grade Wi-Fi Router?), I had to sit out the next session — Moving Towards a Virtual Enterprise, not that it was too interesting.

The issue with talks in the big hall was that somehow, contrary to popular belief they all finished before time and instead of waiting to start the next talk at the scheduled time, the organisers just hurried all the talks along, leading to some of us getting only got bits and pieces of the talks they wanted to attend because they were attending earlier parallel sessions. There fore, the next full talk I attended was the excellent talk by Ebin Hewitt — “10 Things Software Architects Should Know” in which he told people on how problem solving is all about moving them to places where you are more comfortable with them and how one should not blindly “solve” problems, but get a deeper understanding of the needs and build systems that really move the problem to a place where you and your peers are more comfortable dealing with it.

Dr. Robert Marcus‘ talks across the 2 days were extremely informative and honest, shorn of the hype typically associated with Cloud Computing these days. I had the pleasure of engaging him at length about cloud and grid computing at the end of the conference, where he pointed out the availability of his book — “Great Global Grid—Emerging Technology Strategies”. Interestingly, he pointed out that the cover of the book shows a globe surprisingly centered around India and a light shining on it. He pointed it out as a sign of things to come.  Another point echoed by Dr. Robert marcus was the fact that the regulatory and legal framework around clouds is just beginning to emerge and the field of cloud lawyering is going to be pretty lucrative

Anand Ramakrishnan of Wipro gave one of the most candid and honest talks of the event, aptly titled “Cloud Computing – Is it Transformational or a Hype?” which clearly separated the realities of cloud and the hype built around it. Truly, he was one of the few who really told the audience that the cloud is no panacea and one has to be understand that one size never fits all.

The other talks, CapEx-Free IT: How to Refresh your Technology, Deliver Stellar IT, and Still Keep your CFO Happy and Seven Fundamentals of Mission-Critical Service Testing were just so. Especially the latter, which was essentially a rehash of what one should be doing while testing — proper test plans, cases and using realistic, if not real-life data. Honestly, give us a break.

Udayan Banerjee‘s talk about Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Using Open Source Products was a good example of how enterprises are re-using OpenSource for their internal portals etc., something they should anyway be doing. More than the Opensource part, I liked the brief introduction he gave to Enterprise 2.0 shorn of the hype and anchored in practice.

Post that, I tried to attend Ebin Hewitt’s second talk about SPEaRS, but thanks to the timing screwup alluded to earlier, just made it at the end. He pointed out his website: http://spearsource.com/ — “a desconstructed software architectural style of services, processes, events, agents, rules, and semantics”.

I finished up with another of Dr. Marcus’ talks, the one I referred to earlier. This was actually co-hosted along with Mr. Subrata Chattopadhyay of C-DAC, who talked about GARUDA — The National GRID Computing Initiative. This was one of the few free-flowing sessions unconstrained by time and with an extremely frank exchange of ideas across the room.

All in all, it was a decent conference, with some kinks as always. The biggets two I see was the Network. Airtel really screwed up the organisers and got away with giving just half the committed bandwidth and that too over an extremely small area. The food was better the second day (partly because of my partiality to potatoes) and the swag was OK.

Well, here I am in the National Science Seminar Complex at IISc, Bangalore attending the “Big Tent Technology Edition” of this conference. Today is Day 1 and the conference started out well.

The first speaker of the day, Mr. Howard Charney of Cisco gave an impassioned talk on how the world is going to be smart and better, how innovation fuels productivity and the implicit link between productivity and GDP growth. He drew upon the work of many economists and wove an intricate tapestry of technology and the social sciences. He left us with many thoughts, especially those that pointed out the importance of Information Technology. He referred to the 2008-09 Global Information Technology Report (GITR), which I had talked about in an earlier post.

The second talk of the day “Give Cloud a Chance” by Mr. Ramkumar Kothandaraman of Microsoft was the exact opposite of the passionate and thought provoking talk by his predecessor. The only useful thing I gleaned from the entire half-hour of marketing speak about Microsoft Azure was the reference to research done at Berkeley —“Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing”, which does some economic number crunching of the cloud. Otherwise, the speaker was mainly comparing the various Amazon EC2, Google Apps and Microsoft Azure — more a tutorial, and  definitely something not worthy of a keynote address.

Post tea break, I attended a session by Mr. Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMSWatch.com who talked about portals. He pointed out some of the issues that exists in real enterprises in terms of the huge amount of unstructured data and the lack of efefctive enterprise searching. He pointed out the maturity of many of the OpenSource portal and methinks he recommended Liferay.

The talk on “Bridging Internal and External Clouds”by Mr. Ravi Gururaj of VMLogix, was anything but that. I was attending it to understand if he could provide some insights on how one could seamlessly bridge internal and external clouds, but apart from the obvious of using common APIs, I could not gather more.

Lunch was an insipid affair followed by Shouvick Mukerjee of Yahoo!’s talk on Cloud Computing and how Yahoo! plans to leverage it. Nothing new for me having had insights on how Yahoo! works, but some of it would have been news to many. Mr. Som Sarma of 3i Infotech put together a less technical but more inspiring presentation peppered with real-life insights and the all too pervasive innovation buzzword. On the whole these sessions were interesting.

Then I attended “Cloud Computing Use Cases” by Dr. Robert Marcus who talked about the emerging Cloud standardisation landscape, how PaaS would be the critical element and how they are trying to get major IaaS vendors (barring Amazon) into the same room to discuss a roadmap for standardisation.

Post this, all the rooms I wanted to get into were full, so I gave up and came back. On the whole, an OK summit, not without its hiccups. Some of the major issues I found was with regard to internet connectivity. The much touted 16Mbps Airtel connectivity was non-existent in the main hallwhere access was through an IISc provided Reliance link (yes the same one we all used during  FOSS.in/2008). Finally, I was able to acecss that outside the main hall in the corridors.

Looking forward to tomorrow

While traveling to my hometown for diwali, I got the opportunity to start and finish Porus Munshi‘s book – “Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen: How 11 Indians Pulled Off The Impossible”. What started out as a time-pass read got converted into an engrossing, unputdownable read – an extremely worthy use of a train journey. It is rare to find a book, especially a business book, talking about real cases, on a topic like innovation to become ones companion on a long journey. I had planned to juggle between multiple reading material, but never got a chance to read anything else.

This is a must-read book, especially for the movers and shakers of the industries that supposedly think they are extremely innovative, while they ape the practices of the western world.

India is known as a country not of innovation but of improvisations or ‘Jugaad’, as they say in Hindi. But that has begun to change. We have enough examples in this country of people who have turned industry norms upside down to pull off the impossible in their fields. Eleven such case studies are featured in the book, including: Titan, which came out with the slimmest water-resistant watch in the world; Su-Kam, a power backup company that did not fit into an existing industry but ended up creating a new one; Shantha Biotech, which developed a low-cost Hepatitis-B vaccine and ushered in the biotechnology age in India; Trichy Police, which rewrote policing paradigms to nip extremism and crime in the bud, thus transforming the city. Through the breakthroughs achieved by these organizations, Porus Munshi shows that to do what is considered ‘impossible’ in your particular industry, you have to be subversive and think differently. In the process, if the existing business model needs to be turned on its head, then so be it!

via HarperCollins Publishers India Ltd..

Interesting article by James Boyle, the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. More about him can be found here.

This article is adapted from his book “The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind” which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.

Here is what he has to say about In Re Bilski,

The case that announced the rule on business methods involved a patent over the process of keeping accounts in a “hub-and-spoke” mutual fund, including multiplying all of the stock holdings of each fund in a family of funds by the respective current share price to get total fund value, then dividing by the number of mutual-fund shares that each customer actually holds to find the balance in their accounts.l As my son observed, “I couldn’t do that until nearly the end of third grade!”

He points out some valuable lessons that could be learnt from the history of Intellectual Property Rights Law as it has been applied to software:

First, we should realize that the mere decision to include a technology within a property regime is only the first in a sequence. As the copyright system showed with software, it is possible to trim protection so as to minimize overreaching. As the business-method patent decisions show us, we don’t always do it.
Second, we should understand that we have some new methods of combining property rights and an open “commons” of raw material. The experience of free and open source software should be studied to see whether it has implications for new technologies. We need all the innovation tools we can get.
Third, we should be mindful of the fact that much depends on the moment in the development of a technology when property rights begin to be rigorously applied. For better or for worse, property rights came fully to software at a point when no one would have thought of claiming the most fundamental building blocks—patenting the idea of a Turing machine or the precepts of Boolean algebra. The basics of the field were there for all to build upon. Will that be true with future technologies?

In particular, he cautions about the evolving field of synthetic biology where

it is quite possible to imagine a perfect storm in which the expansive patent law decisions of the past 20 years do to synthetic biology what they could not do to software—lock up the basic building blocks before the field can develop.

An interesting and balanced article which does more than pay lip service to the idea of Intellectual Property (an idea that Richard Stallman calls a “Seductive Mirage”. Though, IMHO, he is right in cautioning people not to bundle different laws, used for different purposes into one big bucket.

via What Intellectual Property Law Should Learn from Software | September 2009 | Communications of the ACM.

Nice to see the White House taking inititiave.

The Obama administration has introduced a cloud computing policy that aims to lower infrastructure costs and reduce the environmental impact of government computing. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra says the plan is the administration’s first formal effort to launch a broad system designed to leverage existing infrastructure and cut federal spending on information technology, particularly expensive data centers. Kundra says the government has built numerous, redundant data centers, which has resulted in a doubling of federal energy consumption between 2000 and 2006.

From the CNet article:

As an example of what’s possible with cloud computing, Kundra pointed to a revamping of the General Services Administration’s USA.gov site. Using a traditional approach to add scalability and flexibility, he said, it would have taken six months and cost the government $2.5 million a year. But by turning to a cloud computing approach, the upgrade took just a day and cost only $800,000 a year.

via White House Unveils Cloud Computing Initiative | News | Communications of the ACM.