In The Clouds

There is something about clouds that brings the term into our daily lives. We say "it is a cloudy day", or "there is not a cloud in the sky", or if we feel especially elated or happy we might say "I feel like I am on cloud nine". Now days many are talking about "cloud computing".

In the early days of the Internet we thought of it as a discrete collection of specialized computers called routers which moved packets of ones and zeroes between origin and destination, plus other computers called servers which contained emails and web pages, and the networking infrastructure including telephone wires, modems, and various networking devices such as hubs and switches that loosely tied everything together. Users of the Internet today that are not aware of the technical history — which is the vast majority of the world’s billion + users — know the Internet for it’s most popular application, the World Wide Web. In a sense, the web is a "place" that contains all of the information and applications that we want to use.

In more recent years the larger web application providers, such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and others have begun to refer to their infrastructure as "clouds". If you create a spreadsheet at Google Docs and then save it, where is it actually saved? In the Google "cloud". We don’t know where it really is — it is just "there" at http://docs.google.com — in the "cloud". There are many millions of servers on the Internet but to most people there may as well just be one. That is the beauty of the Internet — you don’t have to know what the infrastructure is.

Even startup companies these days often do not bother with the details of their Internet infrastructure. Many of them use the Amazon cloud. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (aka Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides "resizable" compute capacity in the cloud. For storage, many companies use the Amazon Simple Storage Service (aka Amazon S3) to enable storage in the cloud. The advent of cloud computing has made it possible for startup companies to get from new business idea to a full implementation of their idea in weeks instead of months.

Great for smaller companies but what the really big companies like GE, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Bank of America, BP, or Toyota? How about when they have a new web-based idea? How do they deploy it? Generally speaking it takes a lot of detailed planning. The project manager has to specify exactly what resource is needed — a very specific computing capacity and well defined storage. In many cases it is difficult to be precise when an idea is new. They could use Google or Amazon but chances are they would prefer to have their own cloud. The large companies of the world have vast computing resources and skills and they also have a desire to keep things inside their own tent for various security and intellectual property reasons. Enter IBM and their new plans for "Blue Cloud".

“Blue Cloud” is a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet startup companies by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than today’s predominantly local machines or remote server farms. Blue Cloud technology will make it possible to have the computing resource and storage be specified in "virtual" terms and the cloud will do the provisioning in an automated manner using virtual resources. Underneath the cloud there are real resources but the cloud computing environment manages them in an autonomic way. That means that the cloud responds somewhat like the human body. When we cold we shiver to warm up. When we get hot we sweat to cool down. In a similar fashion, the Blue Cloud will automatically add computing resources and storage on demand and when something breaks the cloud will provide alternate paths to keep things running. The project is based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM’s hardware, software, and services businesses. More than 200 IBM researchers have been assigned to the project and the company expects it’s first Blue Cloud offerings to be available to customers in the spring of 2008. The Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology announced a cloud computing project with IBM this month and many more are expected..

Blue Cloud will not replace the computing infrastructure of the world’s enterprises any time soon but over time, this new approach to IT should dramatically reduce the complexity and costs of managing new Internet projects. Ultimately, most computing may be done in the clouds and billions of people will be interacting with data and applications with handheld devices that will be more powerful than the supercomputers of just a few years ago.

the greaterIBM connection

One of the many innovations Sam Palmisano has spearheaded at IBM is the idea of reaching out to "alumni". The first initiative was a few years ago when he hosted a reception for a group of former executives of the company. A few were retired but most were in senior positions in other companies. That was just the beginning and now the idea of reaching out has been expanded — big time. The number of past and present IBMers is probably close to a million people. Establishing communications with such a huge base can be nothing but a good thing for the company.

When I left engineering school and joined IBM in 1967, it was common to look for a job at a company and expect to stay there your entire career. Nobody thinks that way anymore. If you tell someone you were with a company for decades, they might ask "what’s the matter, couldn’t you find any other jobs?". Another change is that in the old days if someone left the company they were considered a traitor and barred from coming back. Today, there are many executives that left the company at some point, got some experience at one or more other companies, and then brought that experience back into IBM. Some have come and gone multiple times. The turnover has strengthened the company.

And now we have social networks. In the early stages there was a perception that social networking meant eleven year-old girls on MySpace. Now businesses are realizing that it is more likely forty or fifty year-old business people on Facebook and Xing and LinkedIn and Plaxo Pulse. The Internet has enabled everyone to be connected to everyone. Whether it is reading blogs, posting to wikis, updating status on Facebook, or making new connections through viral invitations, it is clear that a big company like IBM has a lot to gain by “connecting” past, present, and future IBMers to each other and with the company. IBM calls it "the greaterIBM connection". On Monday evening the company hosted a greaterIBM reception at the Metrazur at Grand Central Station in New York. More than four hundred attended. It was good to reconnect with some colleagues I had not seen for quite a few years.

Will social networking payoff in business terms? Nobody knows for sure but in my opinion it is certain — as soon as we see the New York Times run a front page story that social networking is a fad, in trouble or peaking out we will have confirmation that success is a sure thing. A short term inhibitor is that there are so many different social networks. As web standards evolve I am confident that we will have a world where people will create one profile and then be able to decide which part of their profile is accessible in which networks.

IBM sees the potential and is investing the time and resources to build a large and active network. The possibilities are endless — collaboration on projects, networking to hire or get hired, crafting deals, referrals to and from IBM and its business partners. As a bonus, social networking is fun and good for morale. I look forward to continuing to be a part of the greaterIBM connection as it evolves. Upon e-tirement in 2001 after nearly four decades at IBM, I don’t really feel like I left anyway! The stories that I have been writing since 1998 over at the patrickWeb blog fall into a number of categories. One section is devoted to "IBM Happenings". I am sure I will also be writing and linking at the greaterIBM connection along with others. Cross linking will increase the overall “connectedness”. That’s what the web is all about. I am really proud that IBM is taking networking and the blogosphere so seriously.

the greaterIBM connection
Greater IBM Wiki

BioEverything

In 1963 there were two tracks that an electrical engineering student at Lehigh University could choose from — electronics or power. Electronics was about solid state devices such as transistors. (The Intel 4-bit 4004, was not to come until 1971). The “power” track was mostly about electric motors and power generation. There was no computer science program, but the university had recently acquired a GE 225 which occupied a good part of the basement floor of Packard Laboratory. Nearly every department at Lehigh began to include computer programming as part of their curricula. Some departments evolved toward strong computer orientation more rapidly than others but eventually computer science and computer engineering became formal programs of their own.

Fast forward forty years and you can see a very similar evolution occurring with regard to bioengineering. Initially “bio” was a special interest area that spread roots from the biology department into various engineering disciplines. Bioengineering has already become a structured curriculum for students interested in the intersection between engineering and biological sciences. The bioengineering faculty is drawn from several departments in the college of engineering and applied science and the college of arts and sciences. Bioengineering combines engineering principles with the life sciences. There are three tracks available to students. Biopharmaceutical engineering encompasses biochemistry and chemical engineering. Bioelectronics/biophotonics focuses on applications of electrical engineering and physics in bioengineering such as signal processing, biosensors, and biochips. Cell and tissue engineering straddles the fields of molecular and cell biology, materials science, mechanical and electrical engineering and encompasses biomaterials and biomechanics. Studies range from cells and tissue to organs and systems. Sound a bit different than transistors and electric motors?

The exciting part of all this is that engineering students with “bio” in their pedigree have much broader career potential including healthcare, biomedical, pharmaceutical, biomaterials, and medicine. Even more exciting is the possibility for those of us who started out back in the days of the transistors and motors and have aging bodies that some day will benefit from bioengineered “components”. The implantable pacemaker was just the beginning. Bioengineering graduates will be developing pacemakers for the brain, cochlear implants for hearing deficiencies, artificial cartilage for our knees, devices to enable the blind to see, and cures for today’s incurable diseases. At some point a nanotechnology “cocktail” will bring nanobots to our internal systems to replace faulty cells with newly engineered ones. Just like computers have become ubiquitous, it is clear that bioeverything is on the horizon. Bioethics will become a larger concern but it is clear that the trend toward The Singularity is underway.

Favorites Update: November 4, 2007

We all have our favorites. Me too. Books, web sites, restaurants, plays, movies, orchestras, composers,
concerts, hiking and biking trails, places to run, etc. Occasionally
I will provide an update from the
favorites database. This will probably happen once a month or so. Latest update on a couple of excellent restaurants and Clint Black at the Ridgefield Playhouse is here.

Favorites

We all have our
favorites. Me too. Books, web sites, restaurants, plays, movies, orchestras, composers,
concerts, hiking and biking trails, places to run, etc. Occasionally
I write about these "favorites" even though they are
not really recommendations — in fact some of them I did not even enjoy — but rather a way of sharing information. I have documented some of the favorites in a database which can be viewed through the links below. When it comes to favorite
web pages, I started this list in 1995 and it grew to more than
1,000 "Favorite Places". I call them places because in a sense
they really are destinations.

After e-tirement from IBM in 2001 one of my (too many) goals is to "get technical" and make improvements to patrickWeb. I have really enjoyed working on this. The site, started in 1995, has been re-built with what is called a "LAMP" software bundle or "stack". That means it uses Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. All of these are free and open source. I use Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 to build the web pages and MovableType to post the blog entries. I will write some more about the LAMP technologies another time. The thing I am most proud of is converting most all of patrickWeb to being a database driven site. That means that instead of "updating" a web page with new information I update a database and then the web page is constructed to always use the latest information in the database. There are many advantages to this approach including flexibility in what information is presented on a page and how it is sequenced. A good example of this is the Favorites.

Each of the sections — books, composers, concerts, plays, restaurants — includes a database retrieval for just the particular category although the favorites database includes records for all of the categories. A blog "Favorites Update" page can include all the records in the database for all categories but only for the last thirty days or for any particular time period. The page is formed using a SQL query. (Structured Query Language — invented at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce in the early 1970s). Using SQL, a page might contain favorite Cuban restaurants visited in the past year rated better than "3" and concerts that included "Clint Black" between 2002 and 2004 — or whatever. Very powerful, and fun to create. At some point I plan to build a page on patrickWeb that let’s any visitor create there own queries into the favorites database.

Books

Composers


Concerts

Links

Plays


Restaurants

IBM Happenings: October 2007

The month of October set a face pace for the last third of the year. The month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. One of the most interesting announcements to me was that IBM announced new software and services to help ensure clients’ success in creating a healthy IT environment based on a service oriented architecture. This comes on the heels of an announcement last month where the company unveiled innovations for healthcare that will have a dramatic impact on patients, hospitals and the general public. The key trends IBM pointed out were in secure sharing of patient data, fully-informed diagnosis from doctors, healthcare providers and hospitals, speeding drugs to market, and stemming the spread of pandemics.

Here are all the other announcements made by IBM during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.