Always check the cable!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, Networking on
It’s a simple rule, and one that fixes a huge proportion of IT problems. I’d have done well to remember it when the door to the office NAS neatly unplugged a network segment, and I spent a happy half hour trying to debug just why the wireless printer wasn’t working.
It’s also one that might have saved us several days of little or no phone connectivity, and an extremely flaky DSL connection that has yet to train back up to full speed. Still, at least now that the BT engineer has visited, we have a new cable between us and the street furniture, hopefully ensuring a faster and fault free connection in future.
BT’s online fault tracking service is well designed, and surprisingly helpful. Log on and report a fault with a line, and you’ll be
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Wubi Tuesday
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows Vista, ubuntu, linux on
“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages - and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings.”
Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry may have come straight from the shores of North East England, but it’s inspired much of the language -and grammar - of IT.
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Put a price on IT - and a value
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, People, Applications, Enterprise, Server, Business, HP on
It’s time for IT to have its own ERP and CRM, according to HP. That’s what the business technology optimization tools it’s developed are for. Today that’s the product name, but it’s such a good phrase that Tom Hogan, the senior VP and global manager of HP software (and, since he bought EDS, services), is thinking of coming up with some other name so he can keep it as a description. It’s meant to make you think of business process optimization, where you discover the way your company does everything has been wrong all along and it’s going to take an expensive stint of consultancy to fix it.
The way most companies do IT is hand to mouth, piecemeal and manually intensive. Imagine a car assembly plant that hand-wrote scripts to control the robots every time a new part had to be made. If IT departments really were the cobbler’s children they’re often compared to, they’d have been barefoot so long they’d be placed in foster care. Most IT departments can’t add as much value to the business as the technology companies tell us their technology can deliver and that’s not just the gap between hype and reality. In a survey that the Economist Intelligence Unit just carried out for HP, an “overwhelming majority of both CEOs and CIOs” believe that “technology is integral to the success of their company” and 88% of CEOs and 90% of CIOs say they “share similar visions for how technology can deliver business outcomes at their company” - which is close enough that they must be at least on the same page. So what’s the problem? As usual, money.
The 70-80% of the budget most IT departments have been spending on maintenance rather than innovation has only just gone down to 60% according to a new survey in CIO magazine. If you’re doing really, really
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HP delivering technology optimization and luggage too
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
We are no longer the people who are keeping the lights - now we are running the company, says Fadil El-Houssine, HP
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24 hours of battery life; now that
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Power, Laptop, HP, Mobile on
When your battery runs out, your laptop is nothing more than a paperweight. More portable devices like the recent rash of
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The LHC isn
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Intel, Networking, HP, Internet on
Simulating the big bang and colliding particles at the speed of light takes a lot of space, makes a lot of data - and it isn’t going to blow up the planet.
The Large Hadron Collider has been running quietly for a week and no tiny black holes have made their way out through the giant concrete end caps yet, so the world is probably safe.
The collider itself is a vast confection of superconducting magnets and we were lucky enough to go down into the caverns last year while it was still being constructed. The scale of the shaft and the cavern are impressive enough; ATLAS is just one of the detectors on the ring and the structure dwarfs the engineers putting to together.
We’ve put together a look at the detector using Microsoft’s Silverlight DeepZoom technology.
An experiment like the Large Hadron Collider also produces a lot of data: 15 million gigabytes a year, streaming out of CERN to a worldwide computing grid at 2GB/second through an HP ProCurve infrastructure. The mainframes and supercomputers that processed the data in decades past have been replaced by rows of PCs. The cavernous computing centre looks like an old school gym; half of it is full of familiar tower cases, the other half is filling up with racks and blades and tape library robots as CERN builds its own mega-data centre.
You need a special invitation - or a research project - to get into the caverns at CERN, now that the LHC is switched on. But you can book a tour to see one of the other particle accelerators, decelerators and colliders where researchers try to recreate the first seconds after the Big Bang - or you can head down to the basement to see the Tim Berners-Lee’s first Web server.
A slightly battered NexT cube with a hand-written label peeling off from the front of the case, the memo of the original World Wide Web proposal lying over the keyboard; if there was a coffee cup in the display case, you’d expect Sir Tim to come back and sit down at any minute. Also behind glass is one of the first Cisco routers to make it to Europe; it’s a hefty beige box that cost $10,000 back in 1984.
Tours start in the dramatic wooden Globe of Science and Innovation, but take a minute to stand in the main reception area across the road. The coloured lights shooting through the concrete floor flash every time cosmic rays are detected; that bright blue could be a solar flare or a supernova.
-Mary
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Breaking the code of a good cause
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Privacy, Security on
Step into the rooms of the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and you’re taking a journey back in time. The whirr of paper tapes signals that the reconstruction of the Second World War Colossus is at work, cracking the same teletype codes it was designed to break at the height of the war.
Now it’s a museum piece, a mix of telephone exchange hardware and ancient valves. Even so, it’s still as fast as many of today’s desktop PCs - at least for the one specific task it was designed to handle. You can download an emulator, ready for most desktop PCs. Only the most recent PCs will be as fast - something that goes a long way to show the power of single-purpose computing hardware.
Code breaking may be the key that gets people in through the door, but it’s the rest of the museum’s collection that keeps ypu there for hours. In the rest of the rooms of the museum you’ll find old friends (and old enemies). Amigas sit next to Atari STs, while BBC Micros are ready for you to type 10 PRINT “HELLO”: GOTO 10 just like the old days. There are still plenty of gaps in the collection, but the biggest one is funding.
That’s why we were there today, to hear IBM and PGP announce that they were donating a hefty sum to the museum’s appeal. It’s still nowhere near enough. A new organisation, the museum doesn’t have the hefty bank balances other museums use to manage cashflow and property. They’d ideally like to raise seven million pounds - enough to cover the museum’s annual running costs from the interest. That’s only a pound or so per PC in the UK - something that’s easily affordable for most individuals and businesses. It’s not much to preserve the heritage of an industry that’s done more for the UK economy over the last few decades than anything else.
PGP and IBM have kickstarted a much-needed appeal - now it’s up to the rest of us (and the rest of the industry) to chip in and make sure that the birthplace of modern computing gets the museum it deserves.
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CPU vs GPU, mythbusted or mythdirected?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in visualisation, Processors, Silicon on
The folk from Mythbusters were on hand at NVision08 to show the audience the difference between CPU and GPU computing. In true Mythbusters fashion they did it with vast amounts of paint, and what must have been one of the world’s largest paintball guns.
First they began with a simple (for them) demonstration of serial operations - using a paintball gun wielding robot to draw a smiley face on a whiteboard. A hundred or so blue dots made the robot one of the slowest (and loudest) dot matrix printers we’ve seen.
Parallel operations would take something a little larger, and their 1100 paintball inkjet printer filled much of the stage. Powered up it would create a picture of the Mona Lisa in glorious 8-bit colour in a fraction of second. Huge air tanks held the compressed air the device needed to simultaneously launch all the paintballs in all the tubes.
The demonstration was certainly impressive, but it was more than a little misleading.
The type of data-centric work that CUDA GPUs handle is more about using parallel processes to handle lots of small pieces of data, not about building complex images from small pieces of data. With a parallel architecture like that you develop algorithms that break down big problems and big data sets into smaller, easier to work with, pieces. Farmed out across tens and hundreds of processors in a GPU, each data block can be processed, before being reassembled and the results delivered.
They’re not new techniques, either, for one thing the approach is at the heart of computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis. The parallel techniques used in GPU computing are certainly impressive, and are already delivering supercomputing to the desktops of the scientists and engineers who need the power (an Nvision session on using GPU-based supercomputers to model the plasma dynamics around neutron stars and the black hole at the centre of the galaxy was particularly impressive). Low-cost high-performance computing is the GPU’s strength, especially when compared to the hefty power requirements of an equicalent array of traditional CPUs.
The Mythbusters’ demonstration was good (and an enjoyable piece of theatre), but it really told a different story. So how could the intrepid special effects team have told the real story of GPU computing?
How about one robot carrying a large, heavy cube across the stage? Suddenly it’s joined and over-taken by a swarm of smaller machines, all carrying smaller cubes - cubes that weigh as much as the single cube on the struggling robot. Or if paint is the preferred metaphor, a can of paint slowly emptying through a single pipe. Meanwhile another can empties through hundreds of holes in much less time.
So, how would you demonstrate it?
–S
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