IBM Advances Research Through Cloud Computing to Help Solve Real-World Problems

Builds Cloud Computing Environments for Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Qatar University, Texas A&M University at Qatar, University of Pretoria, HEALTH Alliance and Kyushu University

 

“Is IBM Commoditizing IT? Or Kicking Off the Next Round of IT Innovation?”

by Alex Fletcher

Newstex Web Blogs

November 20, 2007

This blog post discusses IBM’s recent announcement of its plans to offer a new platform called Blue Cloud.  Blue Cloud is essentially an infrastructure that combines grid computing software, Xen and Power VM virtualized Linux operating system images and Hadoop, an open source software platform that links and facilitates the use of SaaS apps.  The debate Fletcher is addressing in this post is whether infrastructure will continue to be important to the technology, and particularly the computer industry.  It seems that the answer is yes.  Most notably, “as the demand for Web 2.0 capabilities continues to explode over the next three to five years, companies across the globe will have to investigate if/how their current IT infrastructure will scale towards meeting that demand internally and externally.”  In the world of Web 2.0 data storage, access, and the speed access are all very important themes.  Creating a strong scalable infrastructure through cloud computing appears to be the direction we are heading as demand increases and industry must respond.

This post is relevant to understanding cloud computing because it poses many interesting questions about the purpose and importance of infrastructure in a digital world.  As Web 2.0 expands and electronic data in created and needs to be stored, the best infrastructure will control how and where that information is stored, as well as who is able to access the information.  Is what is happening today look like another important trend in history?

Workshop: "Computing in the Cloud"

Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University
“Civics in the Cloud”
Joshua Tauberer – GovTracks.us

January 15, 2008  

This panel at the workshop was very interesting.  The discussion was about using the cloud to strengthen the relationship between citizens and the government.  How?  Joshua Tauberer started a website called GovTrack.us to improve communication between the government and the citizens of this country. Govtrack.us is a tool used to track what is happening in congress.  The website pools resources from a number of different website including Google Maps, local government website, campaign donation websites, etc. You can get customized rss feeds and emails that are relevant to your personal political interests.  Furthermore, it collects information automatically from government website (like Thomas.loc.gov) and represents it in a several new ways.  For instance, there are websites that store public data on campaign donations and there are other websites that track earmark spending in legislative bills, but GovTracks.us puts combines the power of these existing sites in order to track the relationship between earmark spending and donations to study weather politicians are voting based on certain financial interests.

According to Tauberer, the U.S. Government only presents bills and laws in one perspective, but GovTracks.us uses the power of cloud computing to help you to see and understand them from a variety of different perspectives.  Once concern of Tauberer’s is that government has no goals for how to incorporate technology into the legislative process in order to keep citizens more informed.  Fortunately, there is lots of relevant data on government legislative actions, but there is no structure or a system to put relevant government databases together in a meaningful way to help the citizens understand what is going on in congress.

GovTracks.us is an example of how cloud computing can be used to bridge the citizens and congressmen.  This panel helps to illuminate a powerful and influential social utility that can arise from cloud computing.  If GovTracks.us can actually fulfill its purpose, such technology would prove to be a powerful tool for improving the democratic political system in this country.

Workshop: "Computing in the Cloud"

Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University
Introduction, Edward Felten

January 14, 2008 (11:20 AM - 12:00 PM)

On January 14-15, 2008 Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy conducted a workshop on cloud computing called "Computing in the Cloud."  The two day event was sponsored by Microsoft and brought together experts from computer science, law, politics and industry to examine social and policy implications of this emerging computer technology paradigm.  The opening lecture given by Edward Felten, the Director of the Center, provided a general introduction to cloud computing and left the audience with some thoughts and questions to think about during the course of the workshop.  Felten offered a number of different working definitions to familiarize the audience with the uncertainly surrounding what cloud computing actually means.  For him, what connects all the definitions is the theme of location.  This poses the question: why is location so important?  (i.e. if I am the average computer user, why does it matter where data is stored and processed, whether it is on my personal computer or at a remote location over the internet on a foreign server?)  The answer is possession, access and control, and in the world of computing, this means power.  Felden notes that in the digital world, control of data has stronger implications than it has in the physical world.  Finally, Felten gives a brief summary of the history of computing and how we have ended up with cloud computing today.

The issue of controlling data and having "power" in the digital world offers a great deal of food for thought.  What is the purpose of having such power?  Is it to make money, control how and what people think, what they know?  If you consider cloud computing a paradigm and we are in the process of shifting into this new paradigm (if we have not done so already), then many aspects of our daily lives could be drastically impacted.  It seems inevitable that cloud computing will soon be a popular topic for political debate because of its wide range of influence.

"Universities Combine 'Cloud' Forces"

by William Bulkeley

The Wall Street Journal

October 8, 2007

 

This article announces an interesting new partnership between Google and IBM.  The partnership will form a cloud for data storage and processing by computer science and programming students and professors.  The cluster of computers forming the cloud network will consist initially consist of 400 computers, with plans to expand to 4,000.  The cloud will be led by the University of Washington in Seattle, but it will be accessible by students and faculty at 5 other universities including: Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, MIT, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Maryland.  The purpose of the project is to improve computer science and computer programming academic curriculum.  Until recently, curriculum in both fields has been primarily focused on "teaching students how to program a single server and not giving them opportunities to learn about parallel programming." [pg. 2]  IBM and Google intend to create clustered computer environments in academic centers so that students can be more familiar with their (and a growing number of other companies) style of infrastructure in preparing them for future professional experiences.  Google and IBM will initially each contribute $20M-$25M to get the project off the ground. 

Is operating in the cloud really the way of the future?  Obviously, Google and IBM (along with Amazon, and several others) would say "of course!"  This article raises questions about whether new technology is adopted because it is necessarily more efficient, cheaper, etc., or because it is what professionals in their respective fields are taught and feel comfortable using?  This collaboration between IBM and Google will be interesting to follow and learn more about as time progresses.

 

"The Information Factories"

by George Gilder

Wired Magazine

October 2006 

 

Google is building a new server farm along the Columbia River in a small town in Oregon called The Dalles. This server farm will be the site for Google's new 30-acre campus and it will be the largest and most powerful server farm Google has built to date. This farm has been located in The Dalles because the town is home to a dam with a 1.8 Gigawatt power station and the next generation of servers revolves around the issue of power. In order for Google to operate its servers the limiting factor is access and the cost of energy. Google currently has about two dozen server farms located around the world and in total, these farms house an estimated 450,000 servers. Yes, this is a description of the network of hard wear that makes up Google. For you tech folk, the Google servers are estimated to have a capacity of 200 petabytes of hard disk space and 4 petabytes of RAM. This would be enough to copy everything on the Net dozens of times. To put the energy consumption issue in perspective, last year, the servers of the major internet search engines consumed just shy of 5 gigawatts of energy. 5 gigawatts of energy is enough to power the Las Vegas Metropolitan area operating at full force on the hottest day of the year.

Why is the article relevant to a discussion about cloud computing? Cloud computing is about using the power of remote computers systems and servers to operate rather than using the hardware and data storage of your personal computer. The server farms, like the new Google farm being discussed in this article, represent the infrastructure behind cloud computing. In order to use Gmail, view and upload videos to YouTube, etc., we rely on these server farms. As server farms grow larger to house more and more data (as a result of cloud computing) and energy costs increase, what will happen to cloud computing? Could the cost of energy to run server farms eventually lead to the end of cloud computing? Not if there is an alternative energy source...Not surprisingly, Google's foundation, Google.org is heavily invested in research pertaining to alternative energy sources.

“Google CEO: ‘Cloud Computing’ Is Key to Patient-Owned PHR’s”
by Don Long
Medical Device Week
March 3, 2008

This article reports on the 2008 Health Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) annual conference, at which Eric Schmidt (Google’s CEO) was a presenter.   PHR stands for “personal health record,” a term familiar to many in the health care industries, but not so familiar to those outside the industry.  A PHR is essentially a log or journal of an individuals health care treatment, evaluation and laboratory results.  Today, many individuals do not have PHRs, but rather, their doctors and other health care providers individually maintain medical records on their behalves.   PHRs in an electronic format has been referred to as EMRs (electronic medical record), and, “[t]he federal government has been the pioneer in the field of developing standards for universal, interoperable and portable EMR that are often linked to the development of universal health care coverage.” [pg. 1]  Of course the underlying assumption with regard to EMRs is, “that the government would be the one to have, and the one to control, this information.”  [pg. 2]  One of the primary themes of discussed at the conference was the importance of who controls and has access to an individual’s PHR/EMR.  The distinction drawn between the two is that ideally, a PHR would also be in electronic (digital) format, but rather than having the government have access too and control individuals medical records (as would be the case for EMR), each individual would control their health care information.  Hence, the idea is to make PHRs “patient-centric,” as opposed to having the government or health care providers in control of individuals’ medical records.  [pg. 2]  

This is where cloud computing comes into the picture.  Schmidt was at the HIMSS conference to give a presentation on Google Health.  Google Health is a technology that Schmidt says is still in the development phase.  What is Google Health?  According to Schmidt, Google Health is “a system for enabling the creation of PHR, based on ‘cloud computing’ – offering healthcare data that would be completely portable and privacy-protected.” [pg. 4]  The idea is that the system will be “consumer-focused – users can access their data and control who sees it.  The data follows the consumer, wherever they go.  Interoperability is important…[the system]...would not be tethered to a particular health system.” [pg. 4]

This article raises a few important policy issues.  First, there is the issue of creating the informational system necessary to consider providing universalized health care and how individuals medical records should be controlled, stored, and collected.  Second, rather obviously stemming from the prior matter, is the issue of privacy.  Hypothetically, the idea behind using cloud computing (through Google Health) to create and manage individuals’ PHR is so that the individuals have control over their medical records and have the ability to grant a particular health care provider or the government access to their records upon their approval.  If privacy is such an important issue, we should certainly be asking whether we want Google serve as the gateway for establishing and maintaining our medical records and history.

“Early Experiments in Cloud Computing”
by Gale Gruman
InforWorld.com
April 7, 2008

What do the New York Times and the Nasdaq have in common?  Both companies have made a critical and substantial leap into the world of cloud computing through Amazon.com.  Amazon offers its cloud computing infrastructure to third parties for “internet-provisioned computing and storage services.” [pg. 3]  Amazon’s two products are called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). 

The New York Times used S3 in order to convert 11 million articles published between 1851 (the year the newspaper was founded) and 1989 from TIFF to PDF files.  The reason the newspaper converted the files was so that they could shrink them in size and then make them accessible through the nytimes.com website search engine.   What actually happen Ned?  The New York Times cut up old newspapers into columns to fit into the scanners in TIFF  format and then uploaded the files to S3.  In total, the TIFF data took up 4TB worth of storage space (1TB = 1,000 GB).  Then, the New York Times used EC2 to convert the 4 TB of raw data (the articles as they scanned them) into PDF files reducing the total size of the data to roughly 1.5 TB.   The greatest part of the story is that, “[t]he Times didn’t coordinate the job with Amazon – someone in IT just signed up for the service on the web using a credit card, then began uploading the data.” [pg. 4]  The New York Times IT staff completed the job in roughly 24 hours using 100 Linux computers. 

Nasdaq sought to make extra revenue by selling historic data regarding stocks and investment funds.  Nasdaq turned to Amazon to host the data using S3 and also had Amazon design a special reader application using Adobe AIR technology in order for customers to be able to view the data purchased.  

“The traditional approach wouldn’t have gotten off the ground economically…[t]he expenses of keeping all that data online was too high.  So Nasdaq took its market data and created flat files for every entity, each holding enough data for a 10-minute replay of the stock’s or fund’s price changes, on a second-by-second basis.  (It adds 100,000 files per day to the several million it started with.)  The Adobe AIR app Courbois’ (the VP for Data Products at Nasdaq) team put together in just a couple of days pulls in the flat files stored at Amazon.com and then creates the replay animations from them." [pg. 4]

Several issues arise in this story that are pertinent to further discussion regarding policy matters and cloud computing.  As is the case in many other situations, there is a concern about privacy.  For both Nasdaq and the New York Times there should also be concerns regarding the safety and availability of their data.  If either of these companies wants access to its information, they are at the mercy of Amazon, instead of controlling their own data by purchasing and maintaining its own additional servers to do the job.  Of course, both companies measured this risk and it is evident that in both cases, they determined that the cost (or the risk of holding their data remotely in these instances) was outweighed by the benefits (saving lots of money on hard ware as well as labor to maintain the hard wear to house the data).  

"Andy Grove, the former chairman and CEO of Intel, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Google's founders when they started the company, in 1998, believes that there may be more worry about Google than there was about Microsoft.  'Microsoft's power was intraindustry," he told me.  'Google's power is shaping what's happening to other industries.'  Because of this, he says, Google is increasingly seen as a company 'on steroid, with a finger in every industry.'" [pg. 3]

“Computing In The Clouds”
by Aaron Weiss
The Guide to Computing Literature, Networker Magazine
December 2007

In 1943, IBM Chairman Thomas Watson said, “I think there’s a world market for maybe five computer.” [pg. 18] The personal computing industry that began in the 1970’s and current popularity of cloud computing prove that Watson’s statement could not have been more wrong. Weiss defines cloud computing generally as the ability to distribute computer processes over a large number of small computers/servers in order to maximize the efficient use of resources. The idea being if one were to do an internet search through Google, for example, that Google could distribute the work of doing the actual search over a large number of computers rather than one large (and powerful) computer doing the search and returning the results to the user. The relevant question, in this case, is how does Google most efficiently distribute the task of fulfilling the search to many individual computers/servers in order to decrease the time it takes to conduct the search and then return the results to the user.

The article also provides working definitions of SaaS and utility computing in order to understand how they relate or should be considered as part of the larger cloud computing phenomenon. The most important and influential SaaS established to date is the creation of web-based email. While many individuals, organizations and companies do not entirely depend on web-based email service, the trend is quickly moving in that direction. Weiss refers to SaaS, as in the case of web-based email, as merely a revival of an older concept known as “thin client” computing. In the realm of cloud computing, the most relevant concern that emerges is privacy because operating in the cloud and allowing a third party to store and/or process your digital information requires a high level of trust.

This article is relevant because it sheds light on the fact that cloud computing is a popular, “buzzword almost designed to be vague[.]” [pg. 25] One reaction to this piece is to feel that it is not possible to provide a complete definition for the terminology ‘cloud computing.’ Nevertheless, a more appropriate conclusion might be to think of cloud computing as a trend that “draws on many existing technologies and architectures.” [pg. 25]

"The death of the Desktop"

by Michael V. Copeland

December 3, 2007

This blog entry raises a very important question that speaks to the heart of cloud computing. The paradigm in which we operate today feels as if most people have their digital identity primarily contained in a handful of websites. For people between the ages of 15-25, it is hard to argue that Facebook does not have some sort of a monopoly on the market for social content. For email, Gmail would like to make the same claim, but Hotmail and Yahoo Mail continue to serve as widely used and recognized platforms for web based email. Flickr (owned by Yahoo) is very popular for photographs, but many young people would probably say that they use Facebook for maintain their digital photography album's on the web.

This article sheds light on a new firm that is banking on the future of computer users shifting over to the cloud. The company is an online storage firm called BOX.NET, from Palo Alto, CA, and is two years old. Their main concept is a program they have created, OpenBox, which has an open platform. The idea is that the user can store all kinds of digital content online that can be accessed by other web-based applications, rather than having to upload content from your pc each time you want to add something to a particular web-based application.

This service hinges upon a critical assumption: that the web-based applications (ie. Facebook) that its clients (ie. the person who stores data on box.net) intent to feed with content from its website will actually adopt its open platform to allow for the users to access the box.net content. Considering this scenario raises an interesting question: Will the future of cloud computing become another platform for a struggle between internet companies to try to force its users to choose between one and other, rather than allowing the user to easily share and exchange content between web-based applications

This is a radio interview with Jay Rosen on the podcast show Open Source.  Rosen discusses the current trends in the media, include the communal effort by readers and administrators of the online news site Talking Points Memo to expose the U.S. Attorney's scandal.  TPM won the prestigious Polk Award for its efforts.

Princeton Workshop on Cloud Computing and Public Policy.

An explanation of "The Cloud."

Maybe using light instead of electricity (which runs on coal) is a solution to the pollution caused by server farms.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society.   apophenia is her blog.

In this post, she relates a story from a friend of hers, who centralized virtually all of his online life (and therefore, his life) on Google products, only to have his account erased by Google because of a fraudulent phishing attack.  The story raises concerns about storing all your data in one place and with one company.

Mozilla is currently testing out something called "Weave," a tool that would allow you to synchronize your content on multiple browsers, via a hosting option similar to what Google does.

This goes a step beyond Google, because Mozilla is, of course, a desktop application. So Mozilla Weave would have access to your desktop behavior and the stuff you store on their servers.

Developed by Sun, it's a "networked supercomputer" for hardcore researchers.  Google Docs this ain't.

Haven't read this yet, but it was linked to by the Slate article.  Might be an important article.

A contrarian take on cloud computing from a reformed enthusiast.

Article from Harper's Magazine about how much Google's server farms are polluting a river in the Pacific Northwest.

Google Docs--but at what cost?