A while back Microsoft announced that it was changing the licensing requirements for Visual Studio. Yes, it probably was a response to the success of Eclipse, but it also changed the way Microsoft worked with development tools partners. Two significant announcements today show that it’s a strategy that is starting to pay off.

So what did Microsoft do? First, anyone could get access to the Visual Studio IDE. That meant you could use its editor, and its code completion tools with any language. You could host anything yyou liked in the Visual StudioShell, using it for modelling tools, for programming, or for just about anything you wanted. A generic multi-pane shell could host just about any application, from a E-911 call centre hub, to a (dare we say it in these times of crisis) bank trading desk.

The second part of the change was one of the most significant. Now you didn’t need to target Windows with your development tools. That meant you could use Visual Studio to host a PHP editor working against UNIX Apache web servers, or a development tool for Android or BlackBerry.

One of the tools announced today works in just that way. SapphireSteel’s Ruby In Steel is a Ruby On Rails development tool, built entirely inside the Visual Studio Shell. You can running the resulting code on any Ruby interpreter - whether it’s a Windows version (like Microsoft’s own IronRuby) or one running on a Linux web server somewhere on Amazon’s hosted RedHat EC2 servers.

While Ruby In Steel is a commercial tool,  there’s a personal edition for anyone who wants to start learning Ruby - and it’s a free download. It’ll integrate with Visual Studio if you’ve already got the latest version in place, or it’ll install its own Visual Studio Shell-based UI.

The other Visual Studio announcement came from Embarcadero, home of CodeGear (the old Borland tools company). While most of us had thought they were leaving .NET development behind with the new release of Delphi, for very good reasons to do with developing for the legacy Windows install base, it turned out that they’d been developing a version of Delphi that would drop into Visual Studio, and work with .NET and the rest of the .NET languages. That’s a big move for Embarcadero, and one that will have a significant impact on developers producing rapid UI-driven applications inside businesses. It remains to be seen if Embarcadero’s database tools follow Delphi, but if they do, it’ll be a very interesting add on to a familair environment.

The Microsoft developer world is getting interesting again, and with the snippets of Visual Studio 10 that got announced a week ago, it’s going to get even more interesting over the next couple of years.

We’ll be going into things in more detail from Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in LA in a few weeks time. Stay tuned!

–Simon

We are no longer the people who are keeping the lights - now we are running the company, says Fadil El-Houssine, HP’s presales manager, speaking at the Software Universe event in Moscow. And at an airport, that means making the planes run on time.

Real-time information at Heathrow means knowing that the gate is due to close in five minutes and that there are another 24 passengers who aren’t on board yet. (Flying it out yesterday it was only one missing passenger with a bag on the plane and he turned up just after the pilot told us it wouldn’t take long to throw his bag out onto the tarmac). The system HP has built for what it describes as ‘one of the biggest airports in the world’ is a little more sophisticated. A reference to RFID scanners makes us suspect this airport is in Beijing, but most of what’s used for tracking isn’t RFID.

When you step out of the plane, you walk over a mat that deposits particles on the soles of your shoes; the next thing you walk on is a scanner that records the way those particles have stuck to your shoes. The system doesn’t need to know your name or scan your boarding pass; it just keeps track of where the passengers from that flight get to. So if the first person off the plane misreads the sign and turns left instead of right and everyone else follows the guy in front, the command and control centre sees they’re going the wrong way before they go too far and start milling around. If three of the five escalators are going up, leaving a crowd of people who obviously want to get to the baggage reclaim rather than back to the gate queuing to go down, then the system can automatically change the direction of two escalators (as soon as all the  feet it has tracked stepping on to the escalator are tracked stepping off). If there’s a build-up of people at passport control, or everyone is heading to the wrong baggage carousel, the airport team can see it in time to request more staff or make an announcement before everyone gets irritated.

What HP is showing off to the 1,600 attendees from its various Russian customers is the software to make managing a system like that possible, and the tools to make it worthwhile solving the problems at the time because you can see how much it’s costing you. Lights can’t turn off if people who should have been out of immigration half an hour ago are still queuing up, and you’re not making many sales if the CRM system is running at half its usual speed because the hard drive is too full. The difficult bit is working out the figures for what it costs you when something isn’t working the way you wanted and that’s the point at which IT turns into business technology.

–Mary (in Moscow)

Nvidia has decided that the visual computing world needs a conference, and has taken over San Jose to deliver just that. It’s an odd event, with a high-level academic parallel processing track running alongside highly analytical business sessions - and what’s billed as the world’s largest LAN party filling one of the conference halls.

Games may have made Nvidia, but it’s the rest of the graphics industry that keeps it going. Simulation and CAD drive much of today’s industrial design, while complex financial calculations can be run on GPU-powered parallel processors. It’s not just black hole plasma dynamics - it’s also the models that help calculate how a fusion reactor will operate. According to Nvidia GPU computing is bringing supercomputing to the desks of the people who need it the most - for just the cost of a video card.

One of the keynotes showcased a NASCAR simulator used by drivers to hone their skills. On stage we heard a populist story of what it was like to be a driver, and what it was like to use simulation tools. Off stage we heard a more interesting story about how the simulator developers were looking at using the latest generation of GPUs in their application. The ability to use a GPU for parallel processing - and the availability of powerful hardware physiscs engines - has made them completely rethink their next generation, as the new hardware features mean that they can now work on making the simulation more realistic.

That’s what the drivers want. Asked what he really wanted from a simulator, Kyle Busch didn’t talk about new high-resolution graphics or realtime ray tracing. What he wanted was more accurate physical behaviours. In the real world passing on the left is different from passing on the right, while slipstreaming another car can change the performance dramatically. A simulation may look real, but without the physics it’s not realistic at all.

One plan for the next generation is to move away from the current car model, with only 6-degrees of freedom. Instead, it really needs 72 degrees, for all the hinge and flex points - all of which are changing dynamically. That’s where parallel processing comes in, as it allows a car to be modelled in real time, taking advantage of physics engines to turn those model calculations into real world behaviours. Improving the simulation will mean more (and happier) customers - as well as a continually improving model that can be shared with vehicle manufacturers.

It’s an approach that requires specialist processing that goes beyond the traditional CPU. Don’t confuse it with the death of the CPU, though. There will always be a place for the traditional CPU - it’s just that silicon technology has become ubiquitous enough for specialist hardware to offload processor intensive functions.

Need to encrypt something? Just use the hardware cryptosystem built into a TPM. Need to do thread intensive Java? Hook up an Azul network processing appliance. Need to do complex vector calculations on large amounts of data? Use a GPU. Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsen Huang talks about it as heterogenous computing, where the CPU handles tasks, and more specialised hardware handle the complex tasks that tax general purpose silicon.

Intel and AMD may still say that general purpose processors are just what the world needs - but they’re still investing in HyperTransport and QuickPath, the fast buses that specialised silicon needs. I wonder why they’re doing that, if specialised silicon is the dead end they say it is. Is there something about Moore’s Law they’re not telling us?

Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.

With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.

That’s good news for SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com, but it’s bad news for CIOs all around the world - and (in the long run) worse news for proprietary software developers. Why worry about falling over a hole in your Windows Server 2008 licence if all you really need is a set of virtualised Linux boxen running Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl. Fractional licensing is water off a duck’s back to open source and free software.

So what do proprietary software vendors need to do? First and foremost they need to realise that the landscape has radically shifted. Microsoft made one step in the right direction when it realised that cores didn’t equal CPUs and switched its licence model to handle the change in server architectures. It was quickly followed by much of the industry. Now the industry as a whole needs to accept that a server is an ephemeral construct which is tied to a purpose not to a specific piece of hardware, and businesses will need to be licensed either for a maximum number of live instances or for a total number of licenses over a set amount of time.

Why should a company by three server licences if it’s actually only going to have two live at any one time? Two licences should be sufficient. Of course there’s also the issue of disaster recovery, but those purchased licenses should also be able to handle snapshot images of the virtualised servers that are ready to be put into play at a moment’s notice.

At VMworld, back in February, BT’s Stefan van Overtveldt said that vendors weren’t ready for virtualisation licensing. As he said, “On a generic level what I would say is as I come from a software background myself I understand that it’s very hard for software vendors to look at different types of commercial agreements because tracking usage is harder than tracking physical copies”. It’s a perennial problem that goes back to the days of the mainframe - and one that vendors are unlikely to approach with much enthusiasm, especially as most businesses are actually over-licensed.

Any shift to fractional licensing will be likely to result in lower revenues (at least in the first instance), but even so, van Overtveldt is optimistic, and expects vendors to come up with appropriate tools and licenses, “The industry hasn’t come up with standards that say if you transmit this kind of data in this format we will track it and reduce your licensing costs automatically when you get below a certain level of usage. But I believe something will come.”

Let’s hope he’s right.

–Simon

(or “The return of the co-processor”)

The white heat of technology in the 1980s was focussed on the BBC Micro. Not only was it the heftiest 8-bit machines around, its open bus made it possible to add more processing power. With everything from music machines to Z-80s running CP/M, the BBC Micro could share its keyboard with many different CPUs.

Those days are on their way back.

Last week Toshiba announced a new range of consumer notebook PCs. Like many of Toshiba’s systems they’re designed to be media players, and in a side swipe at BluRay, they now come with an upscaling DVD drive. That’s where the coprocessor magic comes in, as Toshiba is using a derivative of the same Cell processor in Sony’s PS3 to drive its imaging software. A quad core version of the Cell sits alongside a dual core intel processor, and it’s used to handle a range of processor intensive tasks - acting as a feed to the GPU that drives the screen. Not only does it upscale DVD streams (very impressively) it also can be used to handle file transcoding (so your movies end up on your iPhone that much quicker), and also works well as a way of quickly indexing images and video.

Focused on video, Toshiba’s co-processor is also taking advantage of bundled web cams for a limited form of gesture control. Stopping a film by holding up a hand is effective, as is using a clenched fist as an in air mouse. Bill Gates’ departure reaffirmed his belief in alternative user infterfaces, and this is one approach to delivering those new ways of working.

Co-processors aren’t just for flashy graphics. Back in the 1990s I was writing mathematical simulation software, and at one point I had some electro-thermal models running on one of the MOD’s Crays. It wasn’t just any old Cray - it also had a co-processor in the shape of an additional vector processing unit. That vector co-processor made short shrift of my arrays of partial differential equations. Its direct descendent is a lot closer than an MOD research facility.

In fact, if you’ve got an NVIDIA graphics card it’s right in your PC’s GPU.

Back in January we wrote about Tesla and CUDA, and NVIDIA updated us on the next generation of the Tesla hardware earlier this week. The new G10 Tesla systems are looking very impressive, and the CUDA parallel programming language extensions are now able to work with standard multicore PCs as well as NVIDIA’s GPUs.

Memory is important when you’re using co-processors, and you need a lot if you’re signal-processing seismic data. Tesla will now support 4GB of directly attached memory per GPU, so a quad-GPU system can work with 16GB of data at a time. The numbers look good - and using Folding at Home a single Tesla 10 comes in at more than 40 times faster than a standard CPU, and more than 6 times faster than a PS3. Other demonstrations showed significant savings in space and in cost - one finance house has reduced its annual costs 9 times, replacing a 600 CPU options valuation system with a handful of front-end CPUs and 12 Tesla GPUs.

Of course with Snow Leopard around the corner, one of the obvious questions was about Apple’s support for OpenCL. It turns out that CUDA is best thought of as a personality layer on top of NVIDIA’s parallel thread execution (PTX) hardware, and it produces device-specific assembly code. There’s no reason why other GPU programming environments can’t produce the same PTX code - but CUDA will remain NVIDIA’s own route to the GPU as a processing tool, and it will be adding support for additional languages beyond C and C++ with Fortran just around the corner.

The future of the co-processor seems assured, for now at least. It’s time for software companies to start taking notice and to deliver on the promise of additional power beyond the CPU.

–Simon

TechEd is Microsoft’s instant university, a place where developers and IT pros go to get information about the current state of all things Microsoft. It’s not really a place for big announcements - though the odd one sneaks out.

Most of the news from this year’s event has been about software moving from one stage of beta to the next. Whether it’s a new beta (like Silverlight 2) or a long running upgrade saga finally getting close to release (like SQL Server 2008) it’s not like a new release of Windows or a new Visual Studio. If anything we’re quickly moving into a world where the big bang launch is a thing of the past. Apple may be still spinning its “one more thing”, but even Snow Leopard will just be an evolutionary move. Instead public betas and community previews will become the way things get done, and the Web 2.0 perpetual beta will be the way of the rest of the IT business works.

Is this the end of the computing world we’ve come to know?

The answer is both a yes and a no.

It’ll be harder to write a software news story, that’s for sure, but that’s not really a problem. What’s really important will be the change in the way IT pros relate to the companies providing them with software. Commuunity-based development programmes mean that you’ve got a lot more clout than you’ve ever had. Instead of passively installing the code you’ver been given you’ve now got a chance to influence its development - so you can avoid big bang deployments that dissapoint and frustrate your users.

So what should you be doing?

It’s worth setting aside some hardware for test and development - and with virtualisation software now bundled free with most OSes, you can probably make do with one multi-core box, saving on space and power. Then sign up for the programmes related to the software and tools you intend to use. Once you’ve got the code you want, start using it the way you would in production, using real data (and if you can, real users).

The most important part of the process is possibly the hardest - you need to take time to join beta communities and take part in the discussions. Report bugs by all means, but also engage with the company representatives and describe your usage scenarios and any deficiencies you see. You’ll be surprised by how many people agree with you, and while you may not get an instant response from the developers, or even see the changes you want in the version you’re testing, your points will have been noted, and will be used to help define the next release of the software.

Beta software is an important tool. It lets you prepare for what’s next, and helps you understand new capabilities and interactions with existing tools. It’ll also make you ready for support demands - another area where beta communities can help, as you’ve got a ready-made peer group where you can share problems and solutions,

It’s a brave new community out there - so why not dive in and make the most of it.

–Simon