Circuit Writer Version 5.10 by Jim Scheef Water Cooling is New? Again we start with IBM and the headline, “IBM Ships First Water-Cooled Supercomputer”. I remember when all “serious” computers were water cooled. That’s still true, but now it’s serious gamers who use water cooling to keep their over-clocked chips cool. The new supercomputer in the article is called Bluefire and will replace three older systems that are no longer quite so super. Remember when we talked about computer performance in terms of MIPS, or millions of instructions per second? The new Bluefire is claimed to offer 76 teraflops, or 76 trillion floating point operations per second. Keep in mind that each floating point operation requires several instructions to execute. The customer is the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) which reminds me of an interesting factoid. Weather prediction was the application that first got John Mauchly interested in building an electronic computer. That was in the late 1930s and he went on to co-invent ENIAC, the first all electronic digital computer. The Bluefire will be used to study the effects of climate change. Net Neutrality Our Congress-people in the House of Representatives have taken up the issue of Network Neutrality again. Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA), and Chip Pickering (R-MS) have introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008. The act seeks to enshrine the principals of net neutrality into law as national policy. Email your Congressperson today and tell him you want him to support this bill. HealthVault Could Microsoft finally have its heart in the right place? I mentioned HealthVault here several months ago when it was first announced by Microsoft. I created an account immediately. An eWeek article suggests that the healthcare industry has been focusing on the needs of providers and payors (insurance companies) rather than consumers (you). Duh! Microsoft seeks to change the way we access our healthcare records by giving us a place to store (and control) those records. As this resource builds, Microsoft hopes that if they build it, consumers will come with their data and developers will come with applications to analyze the data and make possible collaboration between patients and their healthcare providers. The idea is to give you the same access to healthcare records that you get to your financial records at the bank. Only this time, you don’t need to get all your services from one provider to centralize your data. What happens then is anybody’s guess, but the key is that you will be involved in the decision. Desktop Virtualization Before the main presentation at the May General Meeting, I tried to get the presenters to start with the very basics and explain everything. Instead we got a time-compressed version of their regular sales presentation. I was disappointed. Well, there is a very good eWeek article that explains what we missed. While they totally missed explaining it, Citrix has a product called ZenApp. It used to be called Presentation Server which at least gives a clue to its function. Like Microsoft Terminal Services (aka: Remote Desktop), Presentation Server runs on a big central box that is shared by many users. Both Terminal Services and Presentation Server turn Windows into a multi-user system by creating virtual desktops in the central server that you view remotely using client software on your local PC. Since you don’t need a full PC to run the client software, a thin client device can replace the local PC. This is the Windows version of the old mainframe model with the OS and applications running on a shared server with the user sitting at a terminal device. There is only one OS and one installation of the applications to maintain. This technology has been around since the days of NT 3.5 and thus is quite mature. Presentation Server (ZenApp) adds the ability to make an application running on the central server look like an application running on your normal PC. In other words, the application on the remote server appears in a window on your local PC. This middle ground offers central management of major applications like SAP. Network managers use Remote Desktop to remotely manage servers. I use it to eliminate travel to client sites to fix most problems. The next stage of desktop virtualization is a different way to share that big central box. Rather than many virtual desktops within one OS, this time many virtual machines run in a hypervisor on the big central box. The user views the desktop using a remote desktop technology like VNC (Virtual Network Computing) or Microsoft’s RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). Now each user gets his own, separate OS that he can reboot as needed – something that is not so easy when rebooting means closing down every user on the central box. The tricky part to this plan is to store and save each user’s personal settings while still centrally managing the application environment. Much newer, this technology is much less mature. The third type of desktop virtualization is called client-side virtualization. One of the presenters talked briefly about this technology when he described a scenario where a bare-metal PC can boot to a copy of Windows that is passed down to the PC on an as-needed basis. What he didn’t mention is the possibility to put the virtual desktop on a USB key that the user can carry from PC to PC as they move about during their workday. Your personal computing environment becomes a sort of personality module that you can plug into any PC. My columns are available at http://circuitwriter.spaces.live.com/, where there are more links and comments are welcomed. There is even an RSS feed!
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